1. Shifted Awards

    Being selected to present Shift’s Auckland Office entries at the TUANZ (e)-vision Awards was on one hand a generous offer, but also an onerous one. If the entries win, the work must have been good enough to speak for itself, lose and I must have really screwed up.

    Fortunately, my lovely work mates wouldn’t dream of being anything but positive, no matter what the outcome. But that still didn’t quell my nerves as I got up at 5:00 AM to catch a plane to relatively unknown city, taxi to an unkown office, meet some co-workers for the first time in person, and race to an unknown venue to present our work to a rather cold judging panel.

    I don’t know what they’ve been putting in our water up here, but we seem to have been pretty productive at TUANZ this year. Shift has had 6 finalists (5 solely from the Auckland team!).

    Interactive Training
    Tourism New Zealand Tourism Training Tools

    Event Marketing/Integrated Marketing Campaign
    Shiftmas 2003 Snow globe
    Tourism New Zealand Haka Module

    Information/Reference
    Tourism New Zealand Interactive Map

    Business To Consumer
    SKYCITY Entertainment Group Sites

    Community/Not For Profit
    Sir Peter Blake Trust

    Well, after my presentations (which got better each time), and a trip to the famous escalator entranced McDonalds, I crashed at my hotel, after breaking my access card. An early start the next day included one last presentation, a day of work, and then an early finish to prepare for the awards ceremony.

    Work drinks began with a quick chat to Doug Bowman, who was on a tour of NZ. We then wandered downtown to the awards venue. I bumped into an old Analog colleage Kentaro Yamada, who was a finalist with his Alpine Car Audio reactive display technology. We hung out all night, sharing stories, and me coveting his cool phone.

    It turned out to be a very succesful night. Beyond all our finalists, we picked up 3 gold awards, including the Craft award for our entire body of work!

    The relief was immense, a great night transpired with One Red Dog pizza’s followed by Jagermeisters at the interesting and moody Matterhorn.

    Crashing back at the Hotel with Andy in a rather drunken state left me quite worse for wear the following morning. Which found me back on a plane, and back in the Auckland office.

    Was it all a dream?

Notes