Wow.....where to start.....?
The original awards which started the whole thing off were the 3D awards at the 3D festival in Copenhagen back in ermmm 2000. Originally we had statuettes for these but no software etc, then with the demise of 3DF, CGA took these over for the architectural and design professions, and Ballastic started the whole Masters thing in Expose along similar lines (more or less the same categories and judges!). Both of these used an intial vetting process to get the sometimes 1000s of entries down to around 50-100. Then the judges would meet physically in one place and hammer out the placings - usually this was at an FX House so that the winners could be comped into a showreel for the awards event.
My take on categories is that if these are going to expand from best still and best animation there are two or three ways to go:
The first would be on the basis of purpose eg. design presentation image, planning image, marketing image etc.
The second would be techniques eg. out of the box software(the main ones only?), individual rendering packages (the main ones only?), photomontage, non-photoreal renderings, cutaways etc.
Another category might be building types eg. residential, commercial, public (museums), healthcare, engineering (bridges), masterplanning etc.
From a judging perspective, I'm not fussed about getting paid if the logistics of viewing all the entries don't take up too much time. It would be nice as a judge to attend the awards and meet the winners But this obviously increases the overheads of the awards at the cost of the entrants.
I'm not sure about rules of entry, from an entrants point of view there should probably be a limit on number of entries and a time constraint on when they were finished (ie. they should probably have been done in the last 18 months). Individual artists should be attributed rather than studios I think? Perhaps studios should have their own awards for innovation and consistency?
