The VMware video contest might seem kind of obscure but because of the big prizes that they were giving away it would catch my eye whenever I would the contest listings at onlinevideocontests.com.
What is VMware? Dammed if I know. What does it do? I have no idea. And that’s why I didn’t enter the contest. In fact, I’m guessing that’s why almost no one entered the contest even though there was a lot of cash at stake. VMware picked 5 winners last week. the grand prize winner got $5,000 and four runners up each got $1,000. Then they held a viewer’s choice contest at a VMware convention(?) in San Francisco and the winner of that round got a $1,000 bonus. Here are the grand prize winner and the “VMworld favorite” winner:
Grand Prize winner. Prize: $5,000
VMworld Favorite. Prize: $2,000
So both videos are pretty decent. I enjoyed them and I don’t even get what VMware does. So if you DO know what VMware does then you’ll probably really get a kick out of those. My only criticism is that the grand prize winner seemed to use a very familiar piece of music in his video and I’m guessing that was against the rules. Actually, he also used a phone sound effect straight out of 24. This might seem insane but technically that’s copyright infringement. Even sound effects and phone rings(!) were created and composed by someone. This guy managed to slip them through but you should remember that when doing your own videos; all noises that other people create are copyrighted unless noted otherwise. Oh wait, I do have another criticism; that one blue puppet was kind of creepy. His head reminded me of a skull. The red boss puppet though was pretty funny. His confused reactions mirrored my own as I watched these videos.
You can watch the other 3 finalist videos here but the 2 big winners are the best of the bunch. If you watch the other videos you’ll see that pretty much any decent entry would have earned a spot in the top five. So it was a very poach-able contest. The catch though is that not only did you have to know how to shoot and edit a video, you had to understand enough about the product to make something that made sense to other techies.
More entries and details here:
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2009/networking/contests/vmware-videocontest
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The sound effect from 24 isn’t copyright infringement, I’m pretty sure. It’s a standard issue phone ring, which means depending on which recording of it they used, it’s probably open to anyone.
Like, there’s some very specific comedy “boing” sounds that get used a lot, but you can use a totally non-proprietary version of them like the one that comes in Garageband, and you’re in the clear.