2011 CG Whiz Winners Revealed!

After our best year yet, the 2011 CG Whiz competition has officially come to a close with the announcement of our talented winners from all over the world! Escape Studios and its judging panel were totally wowed by the quality of this year’s entries and the incredible level of talent across all categories. 

Here’s what we were looking for in each award catagory from the outset of CG Whiz:

Our Amateur winner:
We were looking for outstanding creative work, artistic talent and originality without the use of cinematic clichés so often used in showreels --like an over-muscled monster or alien temptress.

Our top Young Pro:
Here, we were searching for a maturing CGer who demonstrated excellent technical execution, original thinking and steered clear of the dreaded showreel clichés.

This year, our winners did all this and more in their winning entries and you can watch their showreels at the links below! We think you’ll agree, we’ve picked a really special group of artists and we were thrilled to reveal them last night at our London HQ CG Whiz event!

Thanks to everyone who came out to support the rising talent of the CG Industry last night and celebrate with the winners.

Without further ado, the winners of CG Whiz 2011 are:

AMATEURS CATEGORY

• 1st Prize: Daniel Danielsson, Sweden
• 2nd Prize: Leanne Towers, UK
• Users Choice: Jorge Barros, Portugal

YOUNG PROFESSIONALS CATEGORY

• 1st Prize: Yunsung Cho, United States
• Users Choice Prize: Amila Kumarasinghe, Sri Lanka

Congratulations again to all our winners! But what about their prizes? Glad you asked...

Daniel wins a twelve week VFX course at Escape Studios and a twelve week internship at The Mill. Yunsung wins his choice of a twelve month ZBrush for 3D Artist online course from Escape Studios, as well as a top-spec HP laptop and a show reel review from the CG Whiz judges. You can see the full list of prizes in each category here. 

We also saw an amazingly strong response to the new Viewers’ Choice awards, with a thousands of our fans taking time to consider the entries in both CG Whiz categories and vote. It’s been fantastic to see such a huge response to the fresh talent rising up in the CG world both in the US and around the world -- this year’s winners represent five different nationalities.

We’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who took part this year, and we’re already looking forward to CG Whiz 2012!

Finally, I want to also thank our sponsors: The Mill, CGSociety, Autodesk, HP, 3D Artist and Digital Artist.