Last night I attended the gala Canadian New Media Awards.
The show was held at the incredible Design Exchange in downtown Toronto and was hosted by the ever smarmy but loveable Ben Mulroney. Other presenters included Canadian media darlings Erica Ehm, Amber Mac, and Nadia G.
The big news is that The Test Tube with David Suzuki, a project I worked on with the National Film Board of Canada, won Community Campaign of the Year. The interactive work used of multiple social media to get people thinking about the impact of growth on the world.
It was a real privilege getting to help write and produce this project with the NFB’s digital content team in Vancouver (Rob McLaughlin, Loc Dao, and Adam Neilson). Together we pushed David’s story into new technological realms and got pretty innovative with how invited the social web into the analogy. It was also great working with designer Steve Mackey and the design team at The Vacuum.
After the win the NFB’s Stéphane Bousquet and Silva Basmajian flattered me by inviting me down for the official photograph and to say a few words about the project.
The Test Tube was also a finalist in Best Cross-Platform category but lost to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games sites produced by the CTV and the Consortium of Olympic Broadcasters. Let’s face it they deserved the win.
A tougher loss was in the Best Online Series category where Fulscrn was a finalist with CBC News for our Canadians in Haiti project. This was an amazing and moving project we thought had a good chance at winning. Strangely enough our Haiti project lost to another great NFB project, GDP Measuring the human side of the Canadian economic crisis. As I was sitting with the NFB folks it was hard to feel let down for too long.
All in all it was a very fun evening, and a definite honour to have played a part in two amazing projects named as finalists in three categories. Until next year!