Cutcaster Holiday Contest Winners and Runner-ups

First off, I want to thank everyone who submitted images and vectors for our first Cutcaster Holiday contest. We recieved a really diverse set of images and vectors and had a hard time narrowing it down to just one winner for the vectors and images. Below are the top three submissions in both file types and the winner. Congrats to all those that participated and to the winners.

First we will start with vectors as there were a ton of great submissions. We are a huge fan of vectors here at Cutcaster so keep them rolling in. The two runner-ups in this year's contest were: Leonid Dorfman for "Illustration of Greeting card for Christmas"

and Michael Travers for "Illustration of snow globe ribbon."

Great work guys.

And now, without further delay, your 2008 Cutcaster vector contest winner is Jip Fens for his Illustration of Christmas party.

This illustration was chosen for its' concept and uniqueness. Nice work Jip.

Now we will move onto the photo side of the competition. The runner-ups for the photo contest were from two great contributors.

First runner up was Robert Byron's "Christmas Stocking."

Just nipping him out for second place was Robert Carner's "Christmas, the magic time of year."

And the winner is...drum roll pleaseeeeee.....Vince Clements and his "child's christmas wish list."


Chosen for the excellent composition and colors. This photo truely brings out the Christmas Spirit.

Very proud of everyone and excited by all the submissions. Congrats to everyone and especially Jip and Vince. You guys have won the first annual Cutcaster Holiday Contest.

What your Studio page looks like?

If you are not signed up yet at Cutcaster, you probably haven't seen what your studio page looks like or the amount of features we have built for you inside. Here is a quick screenshot of all you are missing ;-)

We will post more screenshots of the Cutcaster "guts" (what you see when you are logged in) and hope you register with us.

CutCaster Creates an Efficient Photography Marketplace Article

Thanks to Dean Shanson over at Photopreneur for a great write up describing our idea for Cutcaster to his audience. Dean has some great tips and advice for Photographers of all skill levels so take a look and let us know what you think.

Cutcaster offers royalty free images, stock photos, stock footage and stock photography for advertising, publishing or web design.

Some Cutcaster Coverage

Over at Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB), they have highlighted our site. YEEHAW. Since we are still in alpha and they are reporting on sites in beta we might have jumped the gun a bit but thanks to them for posting about us. To learn more about the site, check out our about us page.

Royalty Payments at Cutcaster

Royalty Payments have been dropping for some time now as larger agencies are squeezing the content creator’s profitability for their unique content. To begin at Cutcaster, we are proud of the fact that we return a minimum of 40% of the proceeds to the producer/artist and in most cases more. Cutcaster was concieved and created as the best way to bring content to market and still pay the artist the most for his work. This means taking care of business and distribution hassles so that you are free to concentrate on your creative work. In addition, Cutcaster absorbs all the costs associated with the distribution and sale of your products including software development, maintenance, hosting and promotion. There is no risk to you and you will never have to pay any money for upfront costs. We only get paid when someone buys your work, and we are in the process of creating strategic partnerships so that the audience becomes massive.

Cutcaster provides a 60/40 (in our favor) for non-exclusive rights or 60/40 (in your favor) revenue split for exclusive rights to sell third party content such as stock footage, animations, motion graphics, vfx and photos. Again, this does not cost you or your company money up front, and you get paid based on sales, while maintaining complete ownership of your footage. There are no limitations in the amount you can make in residuals as the popularity and quality of your content will drive the demand for it, which in turn will drive the price. Meanwhile, there are no obligations; at any point you can terminate the contract and ask us to stop selling the footage.

We are going to be offering better commission rates to our founding members so please sign up here to recieve them.

Sign Up at Cutcaster.com

Cutcaster is getting ready for it's launch and we are reaching out to those content creators and buyers to sign up at the site for the alpha launch. You must sign up at the site to receive an invite and we are sorry but the alpha is closed unless you have an invite.

So sign up here.

If you have any questions you can email us or you can check out the FAQ page.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

We had a busy weekend of work and tying up loose ends. Wanted to give everyone a heads-up that we are almost finished with phase 1 and are ready for our alpha launch. If you are interested in being a part of the launch of Cutcaster, sign up on the homepage.

Have a great start to the week and be in touch.

Cutcaster Homepage design.

Here is a mockup of the design for the Cutcaster homepage done by Tavish, our secret weapon. Just a taste of what is to come. To those of you who have signed up on the Cutcaster coming soon page, we are looking forward to our launch later this summer and are ready to rock with you. We couldn't do it without them or their comments and we are looking forward to all the excitement to come.