The 8th Annual Drake Magazine Flyfishing Video Awards, presented by Simms, is being held Wednesday night, July 10, 2013, at 8:30 P.M. in Ballroom A of the Las Vegas Hotel and Casino.
There is a considerable change in format to this year’s awards, with the biggest change being seven new award categories added, and no time limit on the entries. The five-minute film contest was a great solution in 2006, since there were only a handful of flyfishing filmmakers at the time, and even fewer full-length movies.
However, times have changed. There are now dozens of filmmakers shooting great stuff every year, so we believe the time has come to fulfill the original vision of this event: A true awards show with a dozen categories and 3-4 nominees per category, with winners being announced live, onstage, at Vegas.
Starting next year, all awards will be chosen from whatever body of work has been produced the previous 12 months. But for this year, we’re basically making it a “Best of” type show, and reaching back seven years or more to make it a showcase of all that’s been done up to this point.
For anyone who has created something new for this year’s event, your work has not been wasted. One of the new categories is Best New Film, with “New” in this case, defined as “films that have not been seen anywhere before”—not on Vimeo or YouTube or the Filmmakers’ website. This category is for premieres only.
The second new category is called Best of the Web, which is aimed at those many short films that do get posted online and that many people might have seen, but not on the big screen
And what we are most excited about this year is our Reader’s Choice Award, in which you and your friends can go to drakemag.com/bestmovie and vote for your favorite flyfishing film of all time. (Other than A River Runs Through It—we draw the line there.) In other words, if you think it’s one of the ones we have listed, great. If you think it’s the cult classic, Tarpon, from the ‘60s, then no problem. But you only have the next two weeks to vote, as the deadline is July 5th.
Here are the other nine awards categories:
- Best Fishing, Saltwater
- Best Fishing, Freshwater
- Best Conservation
- Best Story
- Best Humor
- Best Adventure (exotic, dangerous, far-flung)
- Best Profile (person in a film with the most character or personality)
- Best Cinematography
- Movie of the Year (must have been released after July of 2012)
Only “Movie of the Year” has to be from July, 2012 or newer, and this winner still gets the $1,000 cash prize. (Of course, “Best New Movie” is also eligible for Movie of the Year.)
All the other categories—this year only—can be from anytime in history (though realistically, unless your name is Guy de la Valdene, “anytime in history” means within the past seven or eight years.)
Lastly, we may have a couple “Special” awards that appear in Vegas. But you’ll have to show up at the Las Vegas Hotel on July 10th to see what those are.
If you’re going to physically submit a hard drive or zip drive, we need to receive it before the Fourth of July at this address:
Drake Video Awards
P.O. Box 11546
Denver, CO 80211
Thank you,
Tom Bie
