The Rookies: Helping amateur artists launch careers.

The Rookies has been around since 2009. It was created by myself and Alwyn Hunt to help aspiring artists launch their careers in visual effects, games, concept art and more. Through mentoring, events and annual contests our goal has always been to help people make a living from their passion. We have been using Wordpress since it's inception, basically pushing it to it's limits and dealing with all its annoying quirks and constant updates. However, we reached out to Envy Labs - a Florida based web development agency and creators of Code School - about a year ago with a plan for the future. It's been a massive journey, but we have just launched the new application and are super proud of the results. The main features of the site are: - Not Wordpress (Yay!) - Ruby on Rails, Heroku, AWS. - includes a proprietary Contest/Challenge building tool allowing us to create small challenges and large annual contests. - advanced project/entry page builder to help simplify and make adding content for your portfolio an enjoyable experience. - complete judging solution to help hundreds of judges shortlist, review and nominate winners in a quick and simple workflow. - private dashboards with targeted content to help artists progress throught their creative journey. - custom reporting tool integration to help provide advanced reporting for sponsors and to generate our annual School of the Year rankings. We know we have a long way to go, but it's great to be able to share our hard work and know that we finally have a platform that can handle our growth and the needs of our members. If you know anyone who is trying to break into visual effects, animation, games, concept art, arch viz, product design, immersive media and motion design please send them our way and we'll have their back. cheers Andrew