About 3 months ago we thought it would be fun to offer the 3rd year animation students at Edinburgh College of Art the chance to win some of our hard earned cash. The idea was a simple one, set the students a brief and the best piece of work wins £250. Better still, the work (from all 14 students) would be displayed on our shiny new flickr site where we would then invite our peers to vote for their favourite piece of work. We'd then award that winner another £250. We figured it would be a win win situation. The students would get the opportunity to show off their work to the very people who might commission them after they graduated. And since the brief we set was simply to create a piece of animation that said "mightysmall" then perhaps we'd end up with a collection of creative and original films that we could use ourselves.

So we met the students to brief them. Then we met them again a couple of weeks later to discuss their ideas. And this is where we had a sense that all might not work out as planned. Most of the students didn't actually come with any ideas at all. A couple did, but their ideas had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the brief. And one had an interesting idea that did answer the brief but had no work to go with it. (more of him later).

So, we talked to them all individually. We tried to help them to move forward. Then we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

With one week to go to the deadline, we met them again. Of the ones that turned up most either had very little to show, or worse still, had decided to start again with new work which still failed to answer the brief.

From this you won't be surprised to learn that most of the 14 "finished" films we finally received were shall we say rather underwhelming. Some were well made but lacked even the slightest nod to the brief. Some were really not well made with poor animation, poor sound and absolutely no idea. One was well made, had an idea and answered the brief.

So, today we went to the art college to discuss the project with the students and to tell them that we'd come to the decision that to showcase all their work to our peers would frankly do them more harm than good. However we decided to still award a prize for best piece. The winner is Steven Shand. He had a good, simple relevant idea, he stuck to that idea, he made it look good, he commissioned some music for his work and created some of it himself. He won by miles.

You can see the winning work and the work of two runners up at our flickr site. I imagine Steven's drinking the last dregs of the £250 in the student bar as we speak. Well done to him. Thanks for answering the brief.

And no you can't see the other 11 entries.