Friday, July 4, 2008

Thanks to our judges!

I should thank our judges and let you know how things were decided in the pre-judging. Everyone I asked responded right away and said they would love to help. I wanted to get alumni with a varied experience in games, 2D and 3D who didn't know the current group of students (other than through guest lectures) Here is the jury (with links to their blogs or websites...click on their names):

Jeremy Tin: 2D Flash designer @ Studio B
Jesse Schilperoort: Animator on Skunk Fu (Ireland), now back in town
Sarah Airriess: grad and former designer at Bardel, now at Walt Disney Feature Animation (1st pick: House of Wooo!)
Seng Lau: 3D theatrical animator at Vanguard, now at Next Level Games
Clio Chiang: storyboard artist at Studio B and independent artist (Flight series)
Derek Stenning: concept artist at Next Level Games. Derek also brought in:
Sean Murch, the CEO of Playful Entertainment who has developed projects for Nelvana, EA and Radical. Derek and Sean decided together and picked R.I.P. Alice as their first choice.

I asked each judge to give me their top 6 picks, in order. The results were varied: of the seven judges, there were five different first place picks! So I took each 1st place pick and the remaining 6th pick was determined by math. Princess & Mermaid was the 3rd pick of four judges and no other piece ranked as high so it was included too (fortunate for us!).

I'm opening this site up so that the other entries can be seen too...they deserve to be. I plan to do this again next year so get to work! There were a lot of people who should have entered pitches but didn't and I bet a lot of first years didn't think they had a chance. But if you don't produce, how can anyone see how great you are?

Thanks again to our artists and judges!