We just wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year - here's hoping 2009 will bring good things to all of us!

Well, it's been a very eventful year for us here at Total Recut. We started off in January by relocating to the USA from our base in Ireland. The first 6 months of 2008 were spent travelling all over the U.S.A., spreading the word about Total Recut, making contacts, networking, drumming up interest in the project, developing business strategies and coming up with LOADS of new ideas! We went on a Stateside tour travelling to Boston, San Francisco, Kansas City, Dallas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, Chicago, L.A., Oklahoma, St. Louis, Iowa, Omaha, South Dakota, Wyoming and Denver, Colorado to name a few! The main aim was to develop Total Recut and make as many contacts as possible. I had the true honour and privilege to meet Professor Lawrence Lessig and discuss the project with him at the Creative Commons headquarters in San Francisco. In Iowa, Professor Kembrew McLeod was kind enough to give me an audience and in Boston, I met with Professor Henry Jenkins at MIT where we hatched a plan to run a video remix challenge in the summer. The idea was simple...a video remix challenge with an open brief to create a short video remix/mash-up using the theme 'What is Remix Culture?' The remainder of our time in the U.S. was spend organising the competition, acquiring sponsorship, assembling a judging panel and acquiring the prizes. We managed to assemble an incredible line-up of judges - it read like a who's who of respected personalities in the remix space. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge 2008. Without all of your help, it would not have happened!

The judges, who were kind enough to donate their time and interest in the project were Lawrence Lessig, Professor at Stanford University and co-founder of Creative Commons and author of many influential books including Free Culture and his latest 'Remix:Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.' Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparitive Media Studies Program at MIT and author of many books including 'Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.' Kembrew McLeod, Independent filmmaker, Associate Professor at the University of Iowa and author of a number of books including 'Freedom of Expression: Resistence and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property.' Pat Aufderheide, Center for Social Media, who was responsible for the 'Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.' J.D. Lasica, co-founder of ourmedia.org and author of 'Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation.' Matt Mason, critically acclaimed author of 'The Pirate's Dilemma' and founder of wedia.tv. Mark Hosler, founding member of Negativland and remix mastermind extraordinaire. Luminosity, a prominent and respected remix artist in the vidding community. We acquired sponsorship from Avid's Pinnacle for some of the prizes and in the end we were able to offer a laptop, a digital camcorder and a digital media for the top three prizes. We had an open submission round where anyone who wanted to could enter their video which was followed by a public voting round. The ten best videos were put forward into the final to be critiqued and voted on by our panel of expert judges. The final 10 were truly a global group hailing from over 6 different countries and the final winners were DJ Le Clown with his masterpiece, 'Xmas in New York City, Jata Haan with her 'Composition' and Ricardo Carrion with 'Remix Culture II.'

Following the success of the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge 2008, we were nominated for an award at the Europrix Multimedia Awards. We came out with a Europrix Quality Seal and a published entry in the Europrix Annual 2009.

SPECIAL THANKS to iKat381 for his invaluable contributions throughout 2008!

Thank you all so much for your continuing support and participation in the Total Recut project over the last year and we look forward to seeing you in 2009!

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