In honor of the 5oth anniversary, the folks at Future Publishing are hosting a competition for AudioGO, formerly BBC Audiobooks, and they are giving away 50 Doctor Who audio presentations, 25 CDs and 25 digital downloads. These are actually Audiobooks, with a single person reading a novelization, Radio Plays, with a full cast, sound effects, interlude music, and the whole nine yards, Soundtracks from the original TV series with narration to fill in the missing visuals, and several other formats. Some of the soundtracks are from episodes that have only survived in audio form, with the full original cast. They have literally hundreds of them, they have been doing Doctor Who audio stories from the beginning and are still cranking them out. To get and idea what kind of things they involve, you can download the free sampler and listen to 45 minutes worth of excerpts from all the different kinds of programs they produce. The only bad news for this contest is it is only open to residents of the UK (if I was reading the rules correctly), but even if you don’t live there you should grab the free sampler and check out some of the amazing stories you can collect.
The folks at Dark Roasted Blend have posted a very nice article all about Robot Art. There have been some amazing things done in the field, with robot artists from the Bay area to France and everywhere else building future art. If you build future art, specifically digital art in 2D or 3D, still or motion, you still have time to enter you work in the Expose 7 competition. The entry deadline this year is February 23rd for the Ballistic Publishing contest. The CG Society just posted its coverage of the 36th Annual Annie Awards, where Kung Fu Panda swept the field with 10 awards, and their spinoff Secrets of the Furious Five got another 4. They didn’t take all the awards; Avatar: The Last Airbender, Futurama, Robot Chicken, and Wallace & Gromit each took a few home. I was rather ticked Wall-E didn’t get any, as I felt it should have split the main group with the Panda. If you want all the details on the winners, be sure to stop by the Annie Awards Home Page, or you can watch the podcast of the ceremonies. And if you like animation, did you know the NY Comicon is going on this weekend?