The evening started out with Darcy and Greg from Dade Gallery being the most gracious hosts and rearranging their incredible gallery displays (the Secret Life of Bicycles) around to accommodate our ever-growing crowd of Awesome spectators. If you've never been to the Dade Design Lab in Inglewood - you simply MUST put in it on your top10 list of things to do in Calgary this year!
The 90 second pitches were superb again this month. If you didn't know, the finalists have only 1 week notice to get their 90 second pitch together and, other than 4 basic bullet points of guidance, we don't give them any coaching at all. The pitches we see at Awesome rival some of the best I've witnessed in 100s of tech forums across North America!! Awesome Trustee Chris Salmon, our very own Simon Cowell (in accent only!), emcee'd the evening superbly and his family even traveled across the Atlantic and the entire country of Canada to attend this month's event. Now, that is awesome!
First Up: Tony Grimes and "Music Everywhere"
Tony had the most innovative and hauntingly beautiful pitch of the evening ... it started with Aaron playing the saxophone and ended with the entire audience enthused and intrigued by the prospect of having music - delivered by bicycle- to community gardens around the city.Tony said he was inspired to submit his idea after attending July Awesome fellows Claudia & Vlad "Illuminating Calgary" events. Now THAT is awesome!
Next Up: Lisa and Maria - HSCA Garden Market
The Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Association runs an amazing farmers market and this awesome idea is to bring some focus and fun on the celebration of the harvest season. Lisa and Maria spoke with such passion about the community aspects of growing food and our need to both share the fruits of those labours and to celebrate them! A celebration of Urban Agriculture... the first of an annual competition celebrating what can be grown within the city limits of Calgary.
Lucky man Darcy (of Dade Gallery) won the giant zucchini they passed through the crowd! We were thankful they didn't pass around a 400lb pumpkin.
Third Up: Mary and "Word Powered Art"
Mary gave us the most inspiring, quick-witted and bubbly pitch of the evening as she spoke passionately about peppering word art into world of commercialism on digital billboards around the city. Associated with the 16th annual Wordfest event, Word Powered Art aims to bring a commercial break to ads on billboards with flashes of word art created by world-renowned word artist, Angela Silver.
Check out Wordfest's exciting lineup for their Oct 11 -12 festival devoted entirely to sharing the power of words in new ways.
http://www.wordfest.com/
Finally - and last but not least - Matthew Hamel and "YYC Mobile Movie" (aka Guerilla Drive-in)
Matt gave us a thorough and fast-paced pitch on the power of bringing people together in a free venue to share in the glory of old classic movies, free popcorn... and food trucks! - all in an free-form outdoor venue. Matt's idea is to show Casablanca on the side of the old Simmons Building in the fabulously evolving East Village in September (stayed tuned for the exact date and time).
"Casablance is an undisputed masterpiece and perhaps Hollywood's quintessential statement on love and romance, Casablanca has only improved with age, boasting career-defining performances from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman."Casablanca scores an amazing 97% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and 94% from 319,000 user reviews! It's a MUST-see for anyone who has never seen it and a must re-see for those who have!
Matt plans on spreading this concept around the city at various venues - any brick wall will do!
*****
After another very tough deliberation and decision by the 11 trustees in attendance ... but in the end we all agreed that as much as all the ideas were more than worthy of our grant, YYCMobileMovies was the stand out! Congratulations to Matt and we can't wait to see Casablanca with you on and warm September evening!Follow @yycmobilemovie to get the scoop on a movie coming soon to a wall near you!
* special thanks to our own "Administrator of Awesome" Lisa Crosby for working so hard with our venue sponsors and Elissa Lynn "Awesome Correspondence Leader and roving Photographer" for these photos. Amy Darling wasn't with us for this event but as "Awesome Success Liaison" she was instrumental in helping "AudioMob" and "Illuminate Calgary" be the amazing events they were!
Awesome is an all volunteer organization and the power of these amazing people can truly not be measured.
No comments:
Post a Comment