LOS ANGELES — Every winter, visual effects practitioners around the world compile best-of reels showcasing impressive feats of animation, compositing and VFX in hopes of a nomination for the industry's coveted VES Award. The Visual Effects Society (www.visualeffectssociety.com) goes to great lengths to ensure that hundreds of entries are qualified and vetted as part of a submission process with seemingly countless moving parts. This process, run by an awards committee made up of VFX professionals around the world, is connected and managed via Shotgun, the scalable software platform for production tracking, review and asset management.
“We couldn’t do what we do without Shotgun; it has unified our awards process within our committee and with our vendors and sections around the globe. More importantly it continues to provide capacity to refine and improve the awards every year. I’m personally grateful to our committee co-chair Mike Romey for bringing VES and Shotgun together,” says Bob Coleman, VES Awards committee chair.
“With Shotgun, members of our awards committee are able to share notes and stay on top of the latest activity and developments in the submission, nomination and voting process no matter where they are around the country or the world. Most of our awards committee members are already familiar with Shotgun, having used it at some point in their own day-to-day production jobs, so using it to manage the VES Awards process has been pretty seamless,” adds Mike Chambers, chair of the Visual Effects Society
The VES Awards, to be held this year on February 2nd in Beverly Hills, CA, are selected and voted on solely by industry professionals, and are regarded as one of the most prestigious honors in visual effects and animation. As submissions are entered via the VES online form, all of the information related to each entry is automatically stored in a Shotgun database for easy vetting and tracking. Each entry is associated with a secure private link to the related media clip, accessible for review in Shotgun. Throughout the nomination process, Shotgun is used to vet and track entries; voting from the VES’ day-long viewing and nomination event (held by various VES chapters across multiple cities around the world) is also monitored and tallied in Shotgun.