MIPTV: Highrise among Digital Emmy winners, American Express first Brand Of The Year

Highrise: Out My Window (National Film Board of Canada), an interactive web documentary about high-rise buildings in 13 different cities, won in the Non-Fiction Category. The project directed by Katerina Cizek has already been presented at Sheffield Doc/Fest and IDFA.

Battlefront II (Raw TV/Airlock for Channel 4), which follows 12 young people running campaigns to change the world, won its second Digital Emmy Award in the Children & Young People Category, while Shankaboot (Batoota films/BBC World Service Trust) a webseries conceived as a vehicle for exploring social problems often overlooked by mainstream media in the Arab world, garnered the first Digital Emmy Award for Lebanon by winning the Fiction Category.

The Pioneer Prize was presented to Jon M Chu the Creator and Executive Producer of the global online dance hit The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers for “innovative contributions to the field of digital entertainment”.

“This year’s winners attest to the power of social media throughout the world,”said Bruce L. Paisner, President & CEO of The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. “We congratulate them for being on the cutting edge of a vital new form of expression.”

In other MIP news, American Express will be awarded the first MIPTV Brand of the Year Award today, which recognises a global brand for “outstanding contribution to the development and production of branded entertainment programming.”

The jury praised American Express for a number of its media-related initiatives, including the My Movie Pitch at the Tribeca Film Festival, which saw the competition winner’s film entered at the upcoming festival; the company’s partnership with Fox’s hit TV show, Glee, which featured the show’s characters in a variety of short comedy films, online games and social media channels and Unstaged, a partnernship with YouTube and Vevo on live-streaming of concerts.