Dubai-based Blink Studios was recently awarded the Best Art or Film Auggie award for its animated short series Karim & Noor during the 2018 Augmented World Expo (AWE), the most recognised industry AR & VR awards event in the world that takes place annually in Silicon Valley. This win marks a first for the Middle East […]
Dubai-based Blink Studios was recently awarded the Best Art or Film Auggie award for its animated short series Karim & Noor during the 2018 Augmented World Expo (AWE), the most recognised industry AR & VR awards event in the world that takes place annually in Silicon Valley. This win marks a first for the Middle East and adds another notch on Dubais mandate for global innovation and ingenuity.
Since launching in 2016, Karim & Noor has met with a great deal of success having also won the Best Animated Work of 2017 award at the ASBU BroadcastPro Awards in Dubai last year. Episodes are uploaded onto the shows dedicated YouTube channel youtube.com/karimandnoor and feature the adventures of Karim, a seven-year-old boy, and his lanbot a robot lantern. The series uses a short form video format, which is popular with online videos and builds massive viewership with young children.
Speaking about the win, Nathalie Habib, Executive Producer at Blink Studios, commented: Blink Studios is honoured to be one of the first studios in the Middle East to receive international acclaim for its creative achievement in producing films utilising the latest advancements in storytelling technology. We thoroughly believe that being ahead of the game in our art as storytellers and film makers will keep our ideas, stories and products relevant to our audiences everywhere.
AWEs annual events bring together a mix of CEOs, CTOs, designers, developers, creative agencies, futurists, analysts, investors, and top press in a fantastic opportunity to learn, inspire, partner, and experience first-hand the most exciting industry of our times. This years submissions were voted on by a myriad of professionals in the realm of futuristic technologies, including Pearly Chen, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft, Mark Sage, Senior Product Manager at Google AR/VR, and Dr Hong Choi, Chief of Staff at HTC.
The Auggies offer critical exposure to new technologies, ideas and advancements, and this year AWE received the largest number yet of submissions from companies of all sizes and scale, locations and applications–generating fierce competition among each category for a winner. X Reality Experiences technology-mediated experiences that combine virtual elements with reality enjoyed $2 billion in investments during 2017. This value is estimated to grow to around $20 billion within the next five years and as a now-recognised global player that focuses much of its productions on this technology, Blink Studios is set to reap the benefits of this expanding and developing market.
Blink Studios operates in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Los Angeles, and has pioneered the research and development of storytelling through this medium of content experience that is set to become mainstream in the future.
