Sunday, November 26, 2006

TTA: the 2006 awards

I am just back from Vienna in Austria, where the 9th EUROPRIX was held, in fact the Top Talent Award (TTA) for young producers under 30 years of age. The Festival started last Thursday and ended last night with a big gala to celebrate the nominees, the category winners and the overall winner.

The winner of the Thesis Award in the hall of the Arsenaal (c Jak Boumans)












The Gala night was great. It was held in the Arsenaal, a military museum full with statues, plaquettes and paintings. Peter Bruck the initiator of the EUROPRIC Top Talent Award reminded the audience that this museum was about destruction, while we had come together to celebrate creativity.

Before the Gala I circled around the approximately 350 guests from 20 countries. There were Austrian government people. I got also the occasion to shake hands with Mr Fischler the former EU commissioner. But I saw also former employees of the organising bureau ICNM such as Verena and Barbara Korn. Of course all the members of the nominated teams were present. There was also a lot of bear hugging with former jury members such as Ted Baracas, and Martin Sperka. Great was the presence of the Irishman Martin Casey, whoever won the first student award with Broken Tongue and presently has a company which works for AOL and the real estate site Funda Ireland. An there was many a member of the European Academy of Digital Media (EADiM). There were also participants of the EADiM Academic Network, which held a conference in the framework of the TTA Festival; there were some 30 professors and instructors from the Arts and Media School in Tampere (Finaland), Thames Valley University (UK), Hogeschool Rotterdam and Hogeschool Leeuwarden (NL) and Israel. I will come back to this conference later in the mini-serie on the TTA.

The Gala was presented by two former winners of the EUROPRIX. It was great to see these winners come back in such a great shape. They called up the persons presenting the awards. After four categories, a small female combo played some music and when hardly the last note had died, the presenters moved on to the last four categories, ready for the overall winner.

Categorywinners
Category: Broadband/Online:
Project: Swiss Timeline, an overview of Swiss history as reflected in radio and television since 1931.
Country: Switzerland

Category: Offline/Interactive DVD
Project: Sonorama, music from south Benin
Country: France

Category: Mobile contents
Project: CabBoots, specially engineered boots which guide a walker GPS.
Country: Germany

Category: Games
Project: Tulse Luper Journey, a game with riddles in 92 suitcases
Country: Netherlands

Category: Interactive installations & TV
Project: Outerspace, a reactive robotic creature
Country: Germany

Category: Interactive computer graphics
Project: Neighbours
Country: Hungary
Catgory: Content Tools & Interface Design
Project: Shared Design Space, a collaborative tool
Country: Austria

Category: Digital Video and Animations
Project: Tadam, a multimedia puppet show
Country: France.

The overall winner can only be selected from the category winners. In this case it was the project Outerspace was selected. Immediately after the presentations of the awards a discussion started to ensue about the overall winner. It was more robotic than anything else was the main critique. On the other hand the equipment was in the category Installations and does fill well in it. Personally I would have liked to see a multi-channel and multimedia project with more content to it. But I was not on the jury this time; I had jury duty for seven consecutive years. The discussions were always very good with debates going till deep at night.

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