Awards Categories

SciCast works more like the Oscars than your GCSEs — you submit your film, and we’ll automatically consider it in all the award categories for which it’s eligible. We do this partly to keep it simple for you, but also so we can switch categories around a little to recognise as many terrific films as we can.

As a guide, you can pretty much count on the following for the 2011 Awards:

• Best Biology Film
• Best Chemistry Film
• Institute of Physics Best SciCast Physics Film
• Best Earth Science & Environment Film
• Best Engineering Film
• Most Entertaining Film

There may also be a category for Best Film from a Science Technician — watch this space and the blog for news on that.

Where we can, we’ll split the subject categories down by age. In 2010 we had enough entries to do this for Physics and Biology, but not for Chemistry or Earth Sciences.

Usually, we’ll split the overall Best Film award into different age categories too.

Sounds vague? Don’t worry about it. Make the best film you can, and if it’s good enough we’ll do our very best to celebrate it.

Hints and tips

The most fiercely-contested categories are usually Creative & Technical Achievement, Most Entertaining Film, and the Physics and Biology trophies. For some reason, we’ve so far had fewer Chemistry and Earth Science/Environment submissions.

Hint, hint.

Extra categories

We’ll often add an extra category or two — perhaps for Best Original Music, or Best Performance, or Best Animation — to reflect the particular films we receive through the year. There’s no point trying to second-guess us here, as we won’t work out what these categories might be until after the deadline!