May / 2010

From the President

This year’s Awards Gala was a glittering, stellar success, brimming with emotion, conviviality and loads of laughs. People are not kidding when they say, “this is the best little awards show in Canada.” Not bad for an event that started as a backyard barbeque by a handful of cinematographers 50 years ago.

My congratulations goes out to all the recipients of CSC Awards and to all the nominees. However, I would like to pay a special tribute to all cinematographers who believe in their art form and have confidence in their abilities to submit their work into our competition.

I’ve been president of the CSC for 16 years now and during this time I calculate that the CSC has received well over 2,500 submissions for awards. So it’s a bit of an understatement to say that judging for the CSC Awards is a daunting and difficult task.

So, how’s it done? First of all, for the judging to begin, a quorum is needed. A minimum of five full CSC members are required to judge a category. There is no maximum, but usually there are 8-to-10 full CSC’s on hand to be judges, with most ever being 14 for a single category.

Through the years, the CSC has developed its own unique style of judging, where jurists are asked to use a set criterion such as framing, lighting, composition etc., as well as draw from their own experience and knowledge in judging the cinematic skills on the screen. After all the films are screened in a category, the title of each film is read out and the jurists are polled as to whether that film is their first choice, second, third and so on.The films with the lower rankings are then dropped from competition and the process begins again with the remaining films. This is an intense process that promotes much discussion about the cinematography, but ultimately the majority chooses the winner and the nominees. Sometimes the winner and nominees are evident, but mostly it’s a fight to the finish because of the high quality of the cinematography.

This system of judging is time consuming, taking a period of five days to evaluate all the submissions in each category. I would like to thank all the jurors who volunteered their time and expertise to the Awards. We owe you a great debt of gratitude.

I would also like to thank Deluxe for the use of its excellent facilities for all the jury screenings. The CSC is the only awards event in Canada that screens its features’ category in 35 mm.

Thank you once again to all those who submitted their work this year, because without you there is no CSC Awards Gala. To all cinematographers everywhere, the 2011 CSC Awards Gala is only 11 months away. Good shooting.

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