Reggie Watts and Beardyman take charge of the 2012 Vimeo Awards on a specially designed set by Seeper

Collaboration with London tech and design agency Seeper produces innovative awards show as a platform for the best creative films and videos posted on Vimeo

The organisers of the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards show promised something spectacular for this year’s event — and boy did they deliver.

Celebrating the world’s most creative film and video, the awards received 14,567 entries from 147 countries around the world. From those entries 13 winners were chosen from their respective categories with directing collective Everynone making the headlines for their video Symmetry. As well as winning the Lyrical category it also took the grand prize and received an additional $25,000 (around £16,000) on top of the $5,000 category award.

“The quality of this year’s entries was phenomenal,” said festival director Jeremy Boxer. “It wasn’t easy for the judges to choose the winners, but we are excited to see Everynone receive our grand prize. The filmmaking collective consistently creates incredibly strong, fresh work. ‘Symmetry’ is a sensational piece and the absolute embodiment of what we’re celebrating at this event. We can’t wait to see what they do with the grant!”

Speaking to Smart Movie Making earlier, Boxer had promised a ”sensory experience” at this year’s event and the audience in the NYU Skirball Center in downtown New York City, where the awards show was held, were not disappointed.

They were hit with a specially designed sound and motion-responsive, projection-mapped awards show set by London-based arts and technology collective Seeper.  Live performers Reggie Watts and Beardyman stamped their own anarchic presence on the awards as hosts to bring the show to life.

“Instead of having a conventional set, here it’s like a 3D sculpture,” Seeper’s founder, Evan Grant, told Wired.co.uk. “We’ve built this huge 3D form that sits on the stage and we’re projection-mapping onto it.”

Projection mapping is a technology that allows creative art directors to take into account the shape, dimensions and physical features of a surface when beaming a moving image onto it. Several projectors can be used to cover every angle with light, with the overall result being that it can make a structure look like it’s being transformed in front of a viewer’s eyes.

It also allowed for London musician Beardyman to work in collaboration with Seeper to remix the stage along with his voice while he was hosting the show.

A full list of the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards winners and videos is right here.

Collaboration with London tech and design agency Seeper produces innovative awards show as a platform for the best creative films and videos posted on Vimeo The organisers of the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards show promised something spectacular for this year’s...