2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards: One Week Left to Submit!

We know. First we tell you to get your cinematic brain in check for the Northside DIY Film Fest. And then along comes the Greenpoint Film Festival. What can we say? People like to watch. So why not add one more submission to your filmic laundry list and enter the 2012 Vimeo Festival?

Here's the catch:

You have exactly one week until the February 20th deadline to submit your short film, advertisement, animation or any kind of video experiment. But what is the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards ceremony? It's a web video competition doling out $5,000 prizes--and one $25,000 grand prize(!)--in thirteen glorious categories: Documentary, Narrative, Music Video, Captured, Experimental, Remix, Series, Motion Graphics, Animation, Lyrical, Action Sports, Fashion and Advertising. The panel of stellar judges for each category was just announced. Here are some of the names we're jazzed about:

Narrative: James Franco

Series: Aziz Ansari (Parks and Recreation) and Edgar Wright (director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)

Documentary: Lucy Walker (nominated for an Oscar this year for the documentary short The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom.)

Music Video: Colin Greenwood (of Radiohead)

Action Sports: Stacey Peralta (Skateboarder) and Travis Rice (snowboarder)

Fashion: Nick Knight, Thierry Mugler and Nicola Formichetti (UNIQLO creative director)

Animation: Geoff McFetridge (Where the Wild Things Are) and Shelley Page (Dreamworks)

Captured: Barbara London (MoMA)

Lyrical: Maria Popova, Blake Whitman, Philip Bloom

The entry fee is only $5 for Vimeo Plus or PRO users (which is just $5/month when you sign up for the year). The two-day festival will take place in New York, from June 7-9, 2012. You can watch the entire 2010 awards show here to get a sense of what the competition is like.

Get thee submitting!

-- Perrin Drumm

Tech Competition // NYC BigApps 3.0 Invites You To Build Apps That Improve City Life

With New York City's tech community getting some much-deserved attention through the Cornell tech campus planned for Roosevelt Island and the recent protest of SOPA and PIPA, we wanted to make sure all of you Silicon Alley fans are aware of an awesome competition that brings together NYC and technology.

NYC BigApps 3.0 invites software developers to create apps that use city data to improve the NYC experience. As the name suggests, the competition in its third year, with past winners such as the Roadify iPhone App, which employs user-submitted data and official transit data to give users alerts on subway, bus and driving conditions, and Big Apple Ed, a online guide to NYC public schools.

This year's competition will award $50,000 in prizes, including $10,000 and a chance to present their app at one of NY Tech Meetup's popular gathers going to the Best Overall Application.

If you'd like to enter, then you better get coding. The deadline for submissions, January 25, is less than a week away. Some submissions are already in, and you can check out videos, images and descriptions here.

So programmers of NYC (many of whom we happen to know here at 3rd Ward), let's show the city what you've got.

-- John Ruscher

CALL FOR ENTRIES // Curate NYC Seeks Artists for Second Annual Citywide Competition

Visual artists, listen up:

Are you interested in exhibiting your work in NYC galleries and getting in front of the eyes of curators? Then you might want to submit your work to Curate NYC, a city-wide competition presented by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the nonprofit arts organization Full Spectrum Experience, Inc.

Last year Curate NYC's inaugural competition received close to 1,200 submissions and recognized the work of artists like painter Jennifer Delilah and photographer Alexandra Henry. This year's competition will expand to showcase artwork in even more venues around the city and allow artists to sell their work through the Curate NYC website. A juried selection of the top 150 entries will be exhibited as museum-quality postcard reproductions at the Rush Art Gallery & Resource Center in Manhattan from December 1-10. After that, selected postcards, along with actual artwork by additional Curate NYC artists, will be exhibited at galleries in all of five boroughs, including Like the Spice in Williamsburg and Crossing Art in Queens.

In addition to those exhibitions, the artwork, profile and weblink for every applicant will be published on the Curate NYC website, where art professionals and the general public can check it out. There will also be a series of special online exhibitions selected by curators like Kevin Stayton of the Brooklyn Museum, Eric C. Shiner of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and Lowery Stokes Sims of The Museum of Arts and Design.

The submission deadline is October 31. For more info, head on over to the Curate NYC website now.

-- John Ruscher

CALL FOR ENTRIES // Designers, Prove Your Mettle In The 2011 Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament

OK, designers, you officially have this week to apply for this year's Cut&Paste Digital Design Competition--you've got until October 7 to enter. "This is not a passive, submission-based contest," the Cut&Paste folks warn. And they mean it. The tournament is more a combination of a grueling work day and a night of going hard at the club:

Competitors perform live, onstage, before big-name brands and a raucous audience fueled by bartenders, with a deejay cranking out music and an emcee narrating events. Cut&Paste expects competitors to put on a show not only onscreen, but onstage, bringing props, friends, social media tie-ins - anything they can to draw in the judges and audience and stamp their personal style on their work.

Cut&Paste's NYC competition will take place on October 28 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, where 16 designers will compete in 2D, 3D and motion design. Judges will include Jeff Staple of Staple Design, Tristan Eaton of Thunderdog Studios, Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group and artist, product designer and author Jeremyville.

Then Cut&Paste will head to 11 other cities around the world, and the Grand Prize winners of each competition will be flown to the global championship right here in NYC in March 2012. That gives you the edge, New Yorkers—no jet lag.

-- John Ruscher