Award Ceremony

Competition Control runs your closing ceremony from two pages under Displays on the host computer. The Slides page is where you build the deck: an opening slide, speaker introductions, and a pair of slides for each award. The Award Scripts page gives the emcee the words to read for the slide on screen and one button to put the next slide in front of the audience. Building and editing slides requires the Admin role. The Award Scripts page is also open to the Judge Advisor and Display roles, so the emcee can work from their own client device. See Roles and Permissions.

Award slides take their winners from the Finalize page, so you can build the deck before judging is finished and it fills itself in as winners are recorded.

Building the Slide Deck

Choose your awards on the Awards setup step and record winners on the Finalize page first. See Finalize and Awards. Then, on the Slides page, click Generate slides for all awards. The button is disabled until at least one award has been chosen.

For each award, Competition Control creates an introduction slide named "[award] Intro" followed by a reveal slide. The introduction slide shows only the award name, for the emcee to read the description over. The reveal slide adds the winners with their team name, organization, and location. When a performance award goes to more than one alliance, such as Tournament Semifinalist, the generator makes one reveal slide per alliance, named with the alliance's team numbers. Awards with no winner yet are placed at the start of the deck with only an introduction slide and a No winner badge, because the official "award not given out" script is read before the ceremony proper.

Winners recorded after generating appear on the existing reveal slides automatically. An award that had no winner at the time only has an introduction slide; select it and click Add the missing slides for this award to insert its reveal slide. To rebuild the whole generated deck in the standard order, click Generate slides for all awards again and confirm. Generated slides are rebuilt after the slides you added yourself, and any order you gave them is lost.

To add your own slides, click a type under Add Slide:

Select a slide to open its editor below the preview. Slide name is how the slide appears in the list and on the Award Scripts page; the audience never sees it. For an award slide, pick the award in Award and the winners fill in automatically, with the team field locked. Choose Custom award… to type a Custom award name and list the winners yourself in Team numbers or names (comma separated). A winner that matches a team number shows that team's details; anything else appears as typed. Always show solid (never as an overlay) makes the slide fill the screen even on a display group with Overlay enabled, which suits opening titles. Speaker photos can be PNG, JPEG, SVG, WebP, or GIF up to 15 MB, and uploading again replaces the image. Click Save Slide when you are done. Switching to another slide before saving discards your changes.

Use the up and down arrows beside each slide to set the ceremony order. Slides you add start at the end of the list. Click the trash icon beside a slide to delete it. There is no confirmation.

[Screenshot: Slides page with the generated award deck in the left column, the Preview and Program panels, and the slide editor]

Taking a Slide to the Displays

Select a slide and click Take. The Preview panel shows the selected slide as the audience will see it, and the Program panel shows what is live now, marked "Live on [group]". After a take, the selection moves to the next slide. Use the arrows either side of Take to step to a different slide without showing it.

A take goes to every Audience display group, whether or not it is showing the Slides screen, and to any Remote group whose Now showing is Slides. Field groups never receive slides. If a group has Overlay enabled, the slide appears as a lower-third banner over the chroma key background unless it is set to always show solid. If Take is disabled and the page reads "No audience display group found.", create an audience group on the Displays page and assign a display device to it. See Displays.

The selection skips reveal slides for awards with no winner, and Take is disabled while one is selected, so an empty reveal is never shown by accident.

Running the Ceremony from Award Scripts

The Award Scripts page is for the emcee. The left column lists every slide grouped by award. Entries read Introduce the award and Announce the winner (or the winners' team numbers when an award has one reveal per alliance). Awards without a winner read Award Not Given Out. If the page reads "No award slides yet. Generate them from the Slides page to read the ceremony script here.", the deck has not been generated.

Select an entry to read its script. An introduction shows the official award description. A reveal shows "The [award] is presented to" followed by each winner's number, name, organization, and location, plus the top solo score for a solo award. An award not given out shows the official script for that situation with suggested transition lines. On a reveal, turn on Show the whole script to see the award description above the winners; the option resets when you leave the page. Introduction scripts never name the winners, whatever this option is set to.

To run the ceremony:

1. Select the first entry in the left column.
2. Read the script aloud.
3. Click Show on screen. The note beneath changes from "Not on the audience screen yet." to "On the audience screen now.", and a monitor icon marks the live entry.
4. Click the next arrow to move to the following script and repeat.

The Slides and Award Scripts pages stay in step. Whichever page takes a slide, the other follows, so an operator on the Slides page and the emcee on Award Scripts always see the same live slide. If the scripts page jumps to a different award on its own, another operator took a slide from the Slides page.

For a paper copy, print the Award Ceremony Scripts report. It follows your slide order, so the printout and the on-screen script match. See Reports and Printouts.

[Screenshot: Award Scripts page with the award list on the left and the winner script for the Excellence Award on the right]

Keyboard Shortcuts

The emcee can work the Award Scripts page one-handed from the keyboard.