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Winners of Plant-Biology Video Contest Announced by ChloroFilms Project at Penn State University

D C / B K K
6 September 2010
This winning video titled "Kenaf Callus Hoedown" is a quirky but informative demonstration of the early steps required to initiate a plant tissue culture. It was produced by Noah Flanigan.
This winning video titled "Arabidopsis Flower in 3D" was produced by David Livingston. A true 3-D version of the video, for which red-blue or green glasses are required, is available here.
This video titled "Fertile Eyes" was produced by Ela Lamblin with collaborator Dr. Anna Edlund, and was the grand-prize winner of the first ChloroFilms video contest. View more video entries at www.chlorofilms.org.

Winners of an international competition organized at Penn State University for new plant-biology videos on YouTube are being announced today. The winners, whose awards include a share of over $5,000 in cash prizes, are the second group of awardees in a series of competitions organized by the nonprofit collaborative project ChloroFilms, which was started by Daniel Cosgrove, the Eberly Chair of Biology at Penn State. ChloroFilms has awarded $13,600 in prizes since the competitions began in 2009.  "ChloroFilms promotes the creation of fresh, attention-getting, and informative videos about plant life," Cosgrove said. The winning videos, as well as all the contest entries, are on the ChloroFilms web site at http://www.chlorofilms.org/

Two Grand Prizes of $1,000 are being announced for the second group of winners. One of the Grand Prizes goes to Noah Flanigan of Murfreesboro, Tennessee for his entry titled "Kenaf Callus Hoedown" — a lively and quirky music video using stop-motion techniques to illustrate process of culturing plant tissue. Another Grand Prize goes to David Livingston of Raleigh, North Carolina, for his video "Arabidopsis Flower in 3D," which illustrates the internal anatomy of flower stalks using microscopic sectioning and 3D reconstruction. The awards also include four first prizes of $500 each and five second prizes of $250 each.

Another ChloroFilms competition is now underway. All videos for the new competition must be submitted by 8 December 2010.  For more information about contest requirements, see http://www.chlorofilms.org/

ChloroFilms is a nonprofit collaborative project started by Cosgrove at Penn State University with support from the Education Foundation of the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Botanical Society of America, the Canadian Botanical Association, and the Penn State Institutes for Energy and the Environment. With the help of volunteers at colleges and universities around the globe, ChloroFilms is working to combine video, Internet, and social-networking technologies to promote a greater appreciation and understanding of plant life and to make the best plant-biology videos easy to find from its website at ChloroFilms.org.

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