Vimeo Video Awards Adds Action Sports Category

Vimeo is hosting the second running of its festival and online video awards show in New York City this summer. After the event's inaugural run in October 2010, the video hosting company has added three new genres—including action sports—to bring the total number of categories in contention to 13.

There are currently 12 video nominees per category available for online viewing. The Action Sports nominees include entries focused on big-wall climbing, surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding and wingsuit flying. Voting is open to anyone with a Vimeo account, and will be taken into consideration by a three-judge panel of experts assigned to each category. Finalists will be announced sometime this month, after which times judges will huddle to determine winners, and awards will be doled out June 7.

Sense of Flying by Stavfel Produktion asks and answers the question: "What's it like to throw yourself off a mountain and fly at 155 mph?"

Five Full Runs is a cutting-room-floor compilation from Retallack: The movie, starring Tanner Hall, the Selkirk mountains of British Columbia and the music of Itlian composer and pianist Fabrizio Paterlini. Somehow, it all works brilliantly.

Dark Side of the Lens, by Astray Films, captures remote surf breaks off the coast of Ireland in with soulful reverence and poetic voice-over, such as:

"My heart bleeds celtic blood and I'm magentized to familiar frontiers. Raw brutal cold coastlines for the right wave riders to challenge—this is where my heart beats hardest."

Vimeo will whittle each category down to four finalists sometime in May, which will then be judged by a panel of experts. The three judges picked for the Action Sports category include pro surfer Alana Blanchard, skateboard pioneer Stacy Peralta, and snowboard mega-star Travis Rice.

One notable nominee worth checking out that's not shown in this post is On Assignment, by Camp 4 Collective. This six-minute short reveals a stomach-fluttering look behind the scenes of photographer Jimmy Chin's assignment to come up with an image of climbing on Yosemite's El Capitan worthy of a National Geographic magazine cover.  The online photo gallery from this trip make up one of the top-ten-most-viewed features in NationalGeographic.com's history, and the video is every bit as compelling

For information on the two-day Vimeo Festival and Awards Show or to view the rest of the nominees for the Action Sports category—plus contenders in the 12 other categories—go to Vimeo.com/awards. Or better yet, grab a $25 ticket for the live show, happening June 7 in NYC, followed by a two-day festival that includes workshops, speakers and more June 8-9.