The Collaboration... The Connection... The Contest
(released
2/11/2005)
By Douglas Lorah
 On Saturday, February 5, 2005, the Entertainment Industry Incubator held its annual gala and awards dinner at the Wyndham Hotel in Miami Beach. 'Collaboration... A Short Film Contest' is now in its 7th year. The contest works like this... teams from around the state are given a subject. This year, the theme was the connection. The teams were given one month and a limit of $500 to complete their movies. Teams were divided into divisions: student, novice, and professional.
The movies were judged by a semi-final panel comprised of Viviana Batista (Herald.com), Pamela Diaz de Leon (Programmer of the Chicago Latin Film Festival), Dana Keith (Founder/Director of Miami Beach Film Society and Cinematheque), Doug Schwab (Founder/President of Maverick Entertainment Group), and Graham Winick (City of Miami Beach Film Office). This panel named the student winners and narrowed the field of novices and professionals to 15 teams.
The student winners were: 1st place - Mental Pictures from West Palm Beach, 2nd place - Lost and Found from Miami, and 3rd place - Separation Anxiety from Orlando.
The finalists were then judged by another panel consisting of Kelly DeVine (IFC), John Hadity (Executive VP of Motion Picture & Television Production Finance for Miramax), Chris Philip (VP of NBC-Universal Television Distribution), and Monica Sufar (Programming Manager at HBO Latin America).
This year's winners were:
Professional: 1st place - The Connection, 2nd place - Messages, and 3rd place - Irish Luck.
Novice: 1st place - Mind Games, 2nd place - My Daughter Is Dead, and 3rd place - Taylors' Story.
Each winning team received prizes in the form of film stock, production services, studio time and more. The 1st place professional team was also awarded a one on one meeting with an executive from Miramax.
A Jury award also went to Team Menendez for their work on Kinesis. In addition to team prizes, individual merit awards were given to the following people: Jonathan Davenport - Writing, Graziano De Gregorio - Sound, Shane Rhodes - Editing, Josh Skierski - Direction, Tim Steinouer and Mellissa Berry - Producing, and Marten Kaufman - Cinematography.
For pictures from the awards gala and dinner, please go to the Photo Seen.
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