Suzanne awards and Animation Festival

The Blender Conference animation festival shows short films and visualizations reflecting the best creative work people did with Blender in the past year. We invite film makers, artists, animators, designers or scientists to submit their work. 

This year's award categories are again as usual:

1. Best short film
2. Best character animation
3. Best designed short film

Dates, deadlines, and flow of events.

  • Sunday October 16: The deadline for submissions.
    The committee will view all submissions, and pick 5 works to nominate for each category.
  • Friday October 28th, The 2011 Blender Conference Animation Festival.
    Shown will be:
    - The 15 nominated works (5 for each category).
    - A selection of the best non-nominated submitted works
    The visitors to the conference have the opportunity to vote.
  • Saturday October 29th, The 2011 Suzanne Awards Ceremony.
    Winners will be announced. If the winner is present he/she will receive the award during the ceremony. Otherwise the award will be sent to them afterwards.

The committee.

The winners from last year's competition will be asked to form the committee (confirmation of names will follow shortly). 

Details about the categories.

1. Best short film

For this award we nominate work that has a clear director's signature. The audience will choose a winner because it is just the best experience to watch... whether it is for story telling, camera direction, staging or the great characterization.

2. Best character animation.

This award goes to character animation. The submitted video does not have to be a finished product. It can be fully rendered, but may for instance also be a video capture from the game engine.

3. Best designed short film.

Covers only the visual aspects of the submitted video. Simply put, the prettiest looking short film.

Submission

All categories cover animations, only digital video files will be viewed/considered for nomination. The piece has to be created entirely in Blender, and rendered in Blender or one of the free and open render systems such as Yafaray or Lux.

Previous Suzanne winners are welcome to submit their work, but are not eligible for nomination in the same category again. 

One can submit a video by:

1. Make sure your video can be downloaded online. Send the link with information about you and the video to the Festival email address.

2. Sending a dvd/cd with the material through the regular mail to Blender Foundation, Entrepotdok 57A, 1018 AD Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 
Don't forget to take into account the time it may take for the material to reach us.

You are free to submit a piece restricted to screening only during the festival, in that case the submission will be excluded from the competition.

In your submission, mention for which category you prefer to be nominated. In certain cases, the committee might decide to nominate a submission for another category.

Videos can be of any format/length, but should play in the VLC player. They will be displayed as HD/widescreen format (24/25/30fps, 1920 x 1080px progressive, square pixel, xvid encoded video, 44.1hz 16bit stereo audio). If you have the opportunity, submitting material in a similar format will result in a better final quality of the viewed work. 

If the submitted work is longer than 5 minutes, you may be asked to provide a shorter version for the festival, or to tell us what portion to show.

For competition submissions, the Blender Foundation must be allowed to show and distribute the work via their own channels. The videos will be made available for viewing/download at the blender.org website during and after the conference.

Any questions: just use the Festival email address.

Prizes

 The three winners will receive a cool 3d printed Suzanne statue, five of the latest DVDs from the Blender e-shop, and EUR 250 cash!

The nominations will each get a free pick of a DVD in our e-shop.



Features & Gallery

Download

Tutorials & Help

Community

Development

Blender Store