$10,000 is a lot of money….A LOT OF MONEY. When a contest has a prize that big, should you even bother entering? Doesn’t the huge prize mean that the pros and semi-pros will come out of the woodwork and blow everyone away with a bunch of super slick productions?

Well…depends on the contest I guess. I remember the SkinIt.com contest from a few months back had a prize of 10 grand and got a lot of really awesome and professional looking submissions. But that contest was easy to enter. All you had to do was go online and order some “skins” for your laptop and shoot a commercial.

Now compare that to “The Jellystone Park Video Contest.” The goal of that competition was to “capture the fun you have at Jellystone Park in a 30- to 90- second (up to 3-minute) video for a chance to win $10,000.” That means that if you wanted a real shot at winning you would have to physically go to one of the Jellystone campground/parks that are spread across North America. And that takes a lot of commitment. Chances are that most pro/semi-pro filmmakers live in or near urban areas, right? So how many would actually make the trek out to the woods to shoot a video for this contest?

Not many. Jellystone got almost 80 entries but by the looks of the finalists, most of the people who entered were…NOT filmmakers! Gasp! Oh the horror. It gets worse; the winners of the 10 grand are just some FAMILY!

Ok, I kid of course. But really, most of the entries I saw were just created by actual patrons of the parks, which mean amateurs with family video cameras. In a way, it’s sort of neat to see a contest that didn’t get sniped by some slick pro. This contest goes to show that even if you don’t have high-end camera gear or years of production experience you still have a shot at winning because you never know really what the judges will like. Check out the winning Jellystone video and you’ll see what I mean. It was a simple video with a nice little story and it even manages to make the park look fun. Watch this and tell me that you don’t want to go jump on one of those giant bouncy things!

I can’t embed the winning video so click on the link below to watch it.

Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $10,000.