Animal Planet’s “Dog Park,” Spurlock’s “Failure Club” among Webby nominees

April 11, 2012 by Barry Walsh

Webby Awards

Numerous projects noted as the best examples of the intersection between non-fiction and the ‘Net are part of the nominees list for the upcoming 16th annual Webby Awards.

The awards show, billed as “the Internet’s highest honor” by The New York Times, is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS) and recognizes the best international work seen on the Internet, including websites, interactive advertising & media, online film & video, and mobile & apps.

For online film and video, nominees in the documentary series category include Sundance Channel’s short film series Beginnings, Art21′s New York Close Up, All Aces Media’s Often Awesome: the Series, Urban Survivors from Darjeeling for Médecins sans frontières, and the Women, War and Peace documentary short series from PBS and WNET/THIRTEEN.

Individual episode documentary nominees include I Will Never Be Cut from The Guardian, A Thousand More from Mediadstorm, God’s Lake Narrows from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and two from VICE: Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan and The Rebels of Libya.

Nominees in the reality category include Animal Planet’s original web series Dog Park, the Morgan Spurlock-directed Failure Club series from Yahoo!, Getty Images Music’s 100 Monkeys webdoc, the Periodic Table of Videos project which marries a short video to each element in the Periodic Table, and the Soldier Brother project from the NFB.

All told, the NFB has seven nominations this year, which amounts to a new record for the Canadian public producer. Other multiple nominees include news organizations such as NPR (nine nominations), The New York Times (eight nods), and The New Yorker (seven nominations). National Geographic received five nominations in the mobile web category, while Wired received four.

Winners will be announced on May 1 and honored at a celebration in New York City on May 21. For a full list of nominees, click here.

Tags: Animal Planet, Bear 71, Dog Park, Failure Club, Morgan Spurlock, PBS, The National Film Board of Canada, War and Peace, Webby Awards, Women