About the 2009 Multimedia Contest:

Congratulations to ALL participants in 2009!

This year's theme:
"Choose Your Global Solution"

The basic idea behind the 2009 competition was to play with the idea of Interactive storytelling. We asked some amazingly creative and inspired artists to give us something that would make their viewers make choices throughout their piece. It was a tall order!  We also opened the contest to almost every format of multimedia that we could think of (and even some we didn't think of), including several folks who created entire websites around their issue.  Not only did we challenge the artists with the "interactive rule" curveball, we drove our judges a little nuts too!  :)

This was one of those concepts that looked great on paper, but was a bit tougher to produce than our past contests. Those who were able to scale the dizzying heights of the 2009 contest theme and rules, we salute each and every one of you!  You are an unstoppable bunch of artists, optimists, activists and geeks dedicated to leveraging technology for good.

To everyone who made it as finalists, the internet is a little brighter today with your your creativity and multi-faceted awesomeness. And in that spirit of sharing, we proudly present:

First Place: Wil Kristin & Simon Stumpf

Spotlight on Water

"Our project is about water. But hopefully viewers see that this is really the story of a bunch of changemakers taking matters into their own hands and, in creative and committed ways, tackling the problems about which they are passionate. As much as we hope people watching these videos will learn about water-related challenges, we hope that learning about the innovative solutions of African social entrepreners like Kardiatou, David, and Joseph will inspire us to think about new ways of tackling global problems and supporting citizens with global solutions."

Second Place: Janine carbone

Choose the Food

"Hunger kills so many people everyday...People need to learn how to care more, how to help more, and then I think that once everyone understands how to help out their community then that's one step closer to a better world. People need to relate to something in order to join a cause, and people can definitely relate to other people. They just need to learn how to help them."

Third Place: Alex Ro

Who Cares About Apathy?

"This video captures the global issue of apathy in a very domestic setting. The reason behind this was that I felt that a lot of people, including myself think that problems on a global scale sometimes feel "too big" to handle. But something that I hoped to capture was that the global problem of apathy starts at home, in the very areas that we are comfortable with and know...Apathy is a global issue, but to attack it on a global scale, we must fight it in our own backyards first."