Friday, March 31, 2006

The art of communication

I ran across an interesting website today.

Rockstar, the publisher of the infamous Grand Theft Auto" series, has announced the winners of Rockstar Games Upload IV.
"Now in '06, we are pleased to present the cream of this year's edition of our long running digital media competition - the very best creative works, as deemed by Rockstar Games, our esteemed judging panel of industry professionals, and our category sponsors, Independent Film Channel, XLR8R Magazine, Flaunt Magazine and Design Is Kinky."
This year Rockstar received a record number of entries and the showcased crop is quite notable. Of interest to photographers would be the Best Multimedia Design section.

This year Rockstar received a record number of entries and the showcased crop is quite notable. Of interest to photographers would be the Best Multimedia Design section.

Runner-up "Streams of Thought" by Brendan Bruce presents the mundane everyday in an impressive package. His incorortation of text and animation along with photographs is something worth checking out. He's not a photographer, but the pint is, presentation is just as much a wow factor as actual pictures. You wouldn't send out a portfolio without a neat CD and folder would you?

Also noteworthy are Best Short-Subject Films, "You Drive" by Jason Koxvold and "Oedipus" by Jason Wishnow. "You Drive" is a study light and mood that also comes with a nice song and for the film inclined there's some nifty editing worth checking out. "Oedipus" is the original tradedy re-told with stop motion, and stop motion as we know is pure photography (it also blew me away on the auderal side).

What's this have to do with photography? Well aside from examining the effectiveness of communication in the new media and the inheriant visual nature of photography and trying to deduce its place in said media, strictly speaking not much. But the double meaning this blog beyond SLR is "Surrender Laughter Regularly."

So click, go forth, and surrender!

I've spent nearly two hours on runner-up Ollie Rankin's Multimedia Design project "Ten or Eleven" entry alone, and my custom concoction is paying behind this window as I type this. Word to the wise, empty your bladder now, you'll be mixing tunes and exploring for hours.

Enjoy.