Welcome to Gaia! ::

This is Cindy Donovinh reporting live from the red carpet at the first ever Gaia Film Festival! It looks like the admins are getting ready to announce the winners, so let's turn it over to them:

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Last month, we invited our members to produce short films about their life on Gaia. And produce they did! We received over one thousand Film Festival entries. One thousand. That's ten hundreds. That's the kind of number you only see in science books!

To our great delight, many of those films were awesome, hilarious and totally wonderful. A few of them even followed the rules, too! A bunch of us got together, locked ourselves in a room, and propped our eyes open (Clockwork Orange style) to judge the entries. We laughed, we cried, we cried again, we laughed some more, and then we had ourselves a good cry. At last, our eyes red with tears and our throats choked with dried-up laughs, we selected twenty films that best capture the Gaian experience.

We allowed members to submit to this contest in two categories: "my film is awesome" and "my film is awful." For the sake of fairness and hygiene, we have separated these categories into two separate theaters, so the awful films don't dirty up the good ones with their mess, and so the good films don't taunt the awful ones with their cleanliness.

We've also included a short documentary about Gaia Online, which features interviews with smolderingly attractive Gaia employees and devoted Gaia members.

And without further ado, here are the films:

MMVII Teaser: Whoa! What's this? An exclusive glimpse at Gaia's upcoming trilogy of animated shorts, MMVII! Get a sneak peek at what's in store for our 2007 storyline with this prophetic teaser.
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The Gaia Documentary: This short documentary gives you a look inside Gaia Online, from its humble beginnings as a crazy late-night conversation to its present position as the greatest hangout on the web. Check out interviews with Gaia's founders and employees, conversations with devoted Gaia fans and action-packed scenes of painful skateboard injury.
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The Awesome Films: Gaia is proud to present the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the awesomest of the awesome. We received over 1500 entries in the Gaia Film Festival, and whittling them down to a few winners was a painful ordeal. Among so many entrants, these eleven films represent the very best in Gaian comedy, drama and animation.
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The Awful Films: These awful films are the best of the worst: in their own way, they're every bit as entertaining as the awesome films (maybe even more so). From a field of hundreds, we've selected nine short films that rise above the rest to truly define the art of badness. Some are wonderfully stupid, some are charmingly inept, and some are gleefully bizarre. They all have one thing in common: they're awful in the best way.
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We'd like to thank each and every Gaian who entered the contest, whether or not their film was selected for the festival. We had a wonderful time watching all of your movies. It's your twisted, obsessive devotion to Gaia that makes this the best community on the web!

Stay tuned for more films next week! We've got some cool stuff coming up!