Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, actor Ashton Kutcher, Hulu chief Jason Kilar and "Family Guy’s" Seth McFarlane were among those named to the Producers Guild of America’s first “Digital 25: Visionaries, Innovators and Producers of 2009.”
The honor that recognizes individuals and teams that have made the most significant contributions to the advancement of digital entertainment and storytelling over the past year. (It apparently also helps to be on the advisory panel, since Yair Landau of Mass Animation managed to both make the list, and choose it.)
The announcement was made by the PGA’s New Media Council at the inaugural Produced By Conference at Sony Pictures Studios.
“The Digital 25: Visionaries, Innovators and Producers of 2009” were not ranked. Listed alphabetically, they are:
- Sandy Climan, Steve Schklair, Jon Shapiro, & Peter Shapiro, Co-founders – 3ality Digital
- Jeff Bezos, CEO – Amazon (Amazon Kindle)
- Steve Jobs, CEO – Apple computer (iPhone)
- Henry Selick, Creator/Director – Coraline
- Alex Albrecht & Kevin Rose, Co-founders – Diggnation
- Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO – Dreamworks Studios
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO – Facebook
- Seth MacFarlane, founder – Fuzzy Door Productions
- Jason Kilar, CEO – HULU
- Roger Guyett (Visual Effect supervisor), Mike Sanders (Digital Supervisor) and Steve Sullivan (CTO) – Industrial Light and Magic
- Evan Spiridellis & Gregg Spiridellis, Co-founders – JibJab
- Jason Goldberg & Ashton Kutcher, Co-founders – Katalyst Media
- Yair Landau, Founder – Mass Animation
- Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe, Co-founders – MySpace
- Fred Seibert, Creative Director – Next New Networks
- Shigeru Miyamoto, Video Game Designer – Nintendo
- James Cameron, Chairman and CEO – Lightstorm Entertainment
- Ed Catmull (President), Pete Docter (Director of Up), John Lasseter (EVP, Creative), Jim Morris (GM & EVP, Production), Andrew Stanton (Director & VP, Creative) – Pixar Animation Studios
- Laura Michalchyshyn, President/General Manager – Planet Green
- Jonathan Kaplan, Founder – Pure Digital
- Jim Jannard, Founder – RED digital Cinema
- Sam Houser, founder/director – Rockstar Games
- Philip Rosedale, Co-founder – Second Life
- Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone & Evan Williams , Co-founders – Twitter
- Steve Chen & Chad Hurley, Co-founders – YouTube
The final “Digital 25” were chosen by an Advisory Panel of esteemed experts in digital entertainment, which included Nokia Research Center Director Rebecca Allen, Greenberg and Traurig attorney Ian Ballon, MTV Executive Vice President Greg Clayman, Google Head of Content David Eun, Tech Coast Angel Jody Graham Dunitz, Microsoft General Manager of Windows Live Brian Hall, Davey-Brown CEO Lewis Henderson, Mass Animation/Bedouin Media founder Yair Landau, New York Times Senior Vice President of Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz, Marvel Executive Vice President of Digital Ira Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal writer Kara Swisher, MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb and members of the PGA New Media Council.
