Los Angeles, CA, May 13, 2014 -- Shotgun Software, the creative industry's trusted production pipeline partner, announces the first Shotgun Pipeline Awards, recognizing excellence in pipeline tool development, integration, engineering and usage for creative production. Awards will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver, Tuesday August 12, at the Shotgun User Group meeting, and announced publicly on the Shotgun Blog.

As a standardized but highly customizable toolset for production management, asset management and review, Shotgun is developed collaboratively by Shotgun Software and its user community of more than 500 visual effects, animation and games studios worldwide. The Awards will recognize tools that save time and mix creative genius with a clear grasp of how to make a laborious process better and faster -- whether or not they involve or use the Shotgun platform or toolkit.

Shotgun CEO Don Parker said, We want to shine a spotlight on those who well deserve it and rarely find themselves in it  the tool builders inside studios. They re unsung heroes. We see people building amazing stuff that is helping their productions succeed and their studios move to new models  even though that work never makes it onto the screen. We want to acknowledge the coolest, best pipeline tools in the industry and credit those who have built them. Honestly, too, it s just going to be a lot of fun. 

Shotgun will select projects to be recognized with awards from among the following categories:
-- Review tool/pipeline
-- Artist-facing tool
-- Business-side/ROI tool
-- Coolest hack
-- Tool/implementation for games
-- On-set/motion capture tool
-- Open-source virtual production
-- Most creative use of a game engine
-- Mobile app

There will also be an Outstanding Pipeline Achievement award for the flat-out best implementation of Shotgun, and a Pipeline Hero Award for an individual who regularly shares best practices on the dev list and/or a customer-developed tool that has been adopted widely across the Shotgun user base.

The Shotgun team will determine award recipients, and is asking its users to let them know about projects or tools that should be considered  both self nominations  and nominations of other tools are encouraged. Email suggestions to Email Contact by July 10. Note that while awards will be presented at SIGGRAPH/Vancouver, those recognized for their work do not have to be present to receive them.

About Shotgun
Shotgun builds secure, scalable production management, review, and asset management software that clears away chaos, presents information visually, and connects people to each other -- in the studio or in the cloud. A standardized toolset for film, TV and game development pipelines built on the industry s best practices, it enables studios and remote collaborators to increase efficiency and reduce risk through transparency. More than 500 creative companies including DreamWorks Animation, Framestore, Illumination Mac Guff, Blizzard, Microsoft, Walt Disney Animation, Double Negative and Ubisoft have adopted Shotgun s customizable system and contribute to the ongoing development of its growing ecosystem of applications. For information or to try Shotgun at no cost, visit shotgunsoftware.com.