And the winner of the Cut and Paste Contest is…

[The winning motion graphics short for the Digital Design Tournament here in NYC by our good friend Jake Guttormssom.]]

Our good friend Jake Guttormssom!!! YAY!! Jake participated here in NYC this past weekend and WON the motion graphics section of the tournament. We blogged about this contest back in January and we are excited to know one of the winners. Now we are going to let Jake tell his in his own words what happened and how he went about creating his masterpiece.

"Hi, My name is Jake Guttormsson. I just won the Motion Design Competition at the 2009 Cut & Paste Digital Design Tournament In New York City.

It was a live, one day event for 2d Designers, 3d Modelers, and Motion Designers at Webster Hall on Saturday, March 21st. Cut & Paste is a multi-city Tournament holding events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Boston, New York, Toronto, Chicago, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Sydney. It will culminate in the 2009 Global Championship to be held June 20th at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York.

My portion of the contest began with the orientation a week before the tourney. We all met at the Cut & Paste offices in beautiful central Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There we received some training on the Wacom Cintiq 21UX pen tablet monitors (Wacom is a major sponsor of the event, and we each got on of these touch screen monitors to work on for game day.) We then went through the ground rules, we were able to bring 4 prepared assets to the competition (psd's, video clips, 3d models, etc.) as well as any number of royalty free audio clips. No animation could be done before the day of the contest. We have 8 hours to create and render an animation no longer than 15 seconds.

The next day we got our theme which was "The History of Music." A few things I tried to keep in my mind while I was making it: 1) This was going on in front of a live audience; 2)they've been drinking; 3) they've been there for 2 hours already, while they're watching the other competitions, they've been listening to a Dj. I tried to keep my idea simple and easy to read, my audio minimal, the animation fast paced and punchy. And most importantly, it had to be funny. I also tried to design it so it could be built in layers, meaning I could outline the basic premiss, then go back adding more and more embellishments until I ran out of time. This way if it took longer than I anticipated, I would at least have something to show, with a beginning middle and end."

Check out Jake's award winning short above and get ready to cheer him on in the worldwide tournament in June.