Unstaged – A Year-Long Photography Competition With Fantastic Prizes
A Global Photography Event From Four Creative Organisations
Blipfoto has teamed up with Channel 4, the National Theatre of Scotland and Scottish Screen to create a unique international photography competition.
Blipfoto is a daily photo blogging community and Scottish digital success story. Blipfoto members post one photo a day to the site and invite response from their fellow community of “blippers”. Joe Tree, the creator of Blipfoto told 15 close friends about the site three years ago. Purely through word of mouth, they now have “blippers” in 120 countries, with contributions from Malawi to Morningside, Perth to Peru, and Delhi to Dundee. Blipfoto currently holds over 350,000 images and has logged over 2,199,367 comments and they deliver millions of page views per month to over 40,000 visitors. Blipfoto won the 2009 BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Website.
The Collaboration: Channel 4, the National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Screen and Blipfoto have joined forces to create this opportunity. Each organisation shares the common goals of nurturing creativity, artistic innovation, spontaneity and participation. The aim of the competition is to celebrate and share extraordinary moments and stories from everyday life, through this unique online community.
The Competition: There will be three different competitions throughout the year, running from November 2009 to September 2010. The first competition: Unstaged: Scotland at Play will run through to February 2010. Details of final competition will be announced in early 2010.
Scotland At Play [Winter 2009/10] invites submissions that capture the spirit of performance and play in Scotland. The only competition with a geographic limitation, photos must be taken in Scotland to be eligible.
Forever Young [Spring 2010] invites submissions that convey the feeling of youthfulness and vibrancy. This is an open international competition allowing broad examination of a timeless theme.
Nominations and final judging will be based on the entrant’s collection as a whole, where the underlying concept is as important as the technical execution, and where image aesthetics are balanced by narrative text. Unstaged is truly open to all — a winning entry is just as likely to come from a camera phone as an expensive digital camera.
How to Enter: Entry is open to anyone over 13, with a separate category for under 18s. Entrants will be allowed to submit a series of five images with words (the text is as important as the image) to Blipfoto.com/unstaged. Entrants will need to register with Blipfoto.com (registration is free). The competition will be regulated by Blipfoto.com
The Prizes: Over 18s: Winner: £500 cash, a Canon EOS 500D camera, one day shooting with National Theatre of Scotland and a lifetime Blipfoto premium membership. Second and Third place: Panasonic Lumix LX3 and Blipfoto premium membership for a year. Seven runners-up: Blipfoto premium membership for one year.
Under 18s: Winner: £250 cash, a Canon EOS 1000D camera, one day shooting with National Theatre of Scotland and a lifetime Blipfoto premium membership. Second and Third place: Panasonic Lumix FS7 and Blipfoto premium membership for a year. Seven runners-up: Blipfoto premium membership for one year.
The Judges: Members of the Blipfoto community will act as the first judging group, voting the best entries through to the judging panel. The judging panel includes Stuart Cosgrove (Channel 4 Director, Nations and Regions), Vicky Featherstone (Artistic Director, National Theatre of Scotland) Joe Tree (Blipfoto) and Paul McGuigan (former photographer and award-winning director of The Acid House and Lucky Number Slevin) and Mark Daniels (Director, New Media Scotland).
Stuart Cosgrove, Director, Channel 4 Nations & Regions, said: “Channel 4 prides itself on taking creative risks and offering fresh perspectives. Unstaged throws down the gauntlet for budding photographers to do the same. The competitions are all about exposing the extraordinary in the ordinary. We’re delighted to be teaming up with a highly respected partner such as National Theatre of Scotland and a website as creatively exciting as Blipfoto.com in launching this photography event.”
Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director, National Theatre of Scotland said: “National Theatre of Scotland has built its success so far on innovative collaborations which push the boundaries of theatre and redefine our experience of it. Channel 4, Blipfoto and Scottish Screen in creating this exceptional opportunity for ideas, are opening doors for us all to be challenged, stimulated and entertained. We are nothing without nurturing and harnessing the extraordinary talents within our different communities. I can’t wait to see what people’s imaginations will do.”
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