
The multimedia project of Czech Radio Leonardo, the Revealed has won a prestigious award at the Wildscreen festival in the ARKive INTERACTIVE AWARDS category. 412 films from over 45 countries entered the competition of this year's festival.
This biggest and most prestigious wildlife film competition and related projects takes place every two years in Bristol and is considered as an equivalent to the Oscar in the industry. Well known institutions and companies such as BBC, National Geographic, Discovery, ORF, NDR, ZDF, ABC, IMAX, Warner Independent Pictures or NHK take part in it.
The AWARDS category in which the Revealed was represented by a 2 DVD compilation was won in the last competition by a web page The Life of Mammals which was made by BBC Science & Nature Interactive. Sir David Attenborough participated on this project as well.
In this years competition the four projects were in the run for the award. Apart from the Czech Radio's Revealed it was between Springwatch from BBC Science & Nature Interactive, educational CD-ROM Big Foot: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Hamline University from the USA, and a Wildkey project from the British Oxford Brookes University.
Links for the introductory show reel of the festival:
Windows Media player
http://www.wildscreenfestival.org/index.php?pageid=199
RealPlayer
http://www.wildscreenfestival.org/index.php?pageid=197
QuickTime
http://www.wildscreenfestival.org/index.php?pageid=196
As soon as the material is completed we will bring you more detailed information from our representatives - expert consultant Dr. Martin Smrcek and the main cameraman Khalil Baalbaki who represented the project in Bristol. A video report from the award night and from the festival event fill follow.
Martin Smrcek follows directly from Bristol:
"The final ceremony including the prize giving took place in the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. A historical building really added some charm to the festive atmosphere. Almost 500 guests observed half minute trailers of each project in different categories.
Representatives of the nominated films were sitting around large round tables in the front row. At our table, members of our two rival projects in our category were sitting with us. Day earlier when we saw their presentation, we, or at least I did not believe in winning the award. I thought for myself that we only have a chance if the jury would carefully and patiently go through both the DVDs and spend enough time on our ODHALENI/REVEALED web pages. We were not given the slightest hint that we could by any chance win."
"How big was our joy and happiness and spontaneous ovation from the audience - we were probably together with one Indian film the only project which was made outside of the super power countries in the industry such as USA, Great Britain or Japan. I have to admit that I started believing in our victory some half a minute before the announcement of the winner when the anchor of the ceremony, a popular British moderator by the name of Alan Titchmarsh said that the ARKive interactive Award has been awarded this year to an extremely creative and technically very difficult popularization project - in these categories we were ahead of the competition. The prize was presented by the director of ARKive company Mr. Richard Edwards and he wished us more and more success will similar great multimedia projects and that he is looking forward to see them at the future WILD SCREEN FESTIVAL."
"The main prize - the Gold Panda was won by an awesome film Life in the Undergrowth with the moderator being Sir David Attenborough."