Prestissimo, a group of animators from Thailand, won the third annual FJORG! Animation competition at SIGGRAPH for their reel, titled Great Expectations.
FJORG! is the ‘iron man’ competition of animation, with 10 three-man teams competing for 32 hours nonstop to create a character driven animation.
As winners, the members of Prestissimo ‘ Sasapitt Rujirat, Phon Thiramonkol and Lee Croudy ‘ will receive full passes to next year’s SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, $200 gift certificates, medals and a ride on a New Orleans parade float.
Winning second place was AOM (Christopher Monti, XueMei Song, LinLin Si) and in third was Team Riot (John Sabbath, Gayane Baddasaryan, Shuang Chang).
In addition to chair Patricia Beckmann-Wells, the 2009 FJORG! committee included several industry experts such as judge Alex Kuperschmidt, an animator from Walt Disney Animation Studios; floor runners Thereza Flaxman from Harvard University, Dori Littel-Herrick of Woodbury University, Eugene Yong of Digital Domain, Krys Wada, Chris Torres, and Sean Hannon; and Zachary Stokes and Ron Johnson of Walt Disney Animation Studios handling the technical side of the competition.
Also at SIGGRAPH, which was held in New Orleans this year, was the first GameJam! Competition, in which teams had 24 hours to create either a 3-D game engine and a 2-D Flash game.
The team comprised of John Fielding, Rory Riggins, Ryan Neff won best of show for their 3D model, while the team of Laurissa Hughes, Chance Dodd, and Melissa Guldbrand won Best of Show for their 2D video game.
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