FEBRUARY 8th, 2010 UPDATE: In the post below I explain that I suspect that my Casket-full-of-Doritos idea for the Crash the Superbowl contest might have been stolen by another team of filmmakers. Well, the suspicious entry, “Casket” went on to score a spot in the finals and last night it aired during the Superbowl. Since I first wrote this post I’ve learned a lot about the other entry and I am more convinced than ever that I was plagiarized. For a more up to date version of this story, click here: http://videocontestnews.com/2010/02/08/dueling-caskets-full-of-doritos/
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Beardy is camping out to buy tickets for tonight’s 12:01AM screening of Twilight so while he’s away I thought I’d step in and do a little self-promotion. I also wanted to share my Doritos hard luck story. Like pretty much anybody reading this site, I submitted an entry for this year’s Crash the Superbowl contest. And here is that very entry now!
Be honest, it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever seen right? I’m super proud of my submission but I know that the competition out there is tough. And I was totally ok with the fact that with thousands of entries coming in, 6 teams of professional filmmakers with deep pockets and Red cameras and fancy dollies would probably come along and take all the finalist spots. And like I said, I was totally cool with that. But then….I saw this:
Ahhhhh! Some team of professional filmmakers with deep pockets and a Red camera and a fancy dolly came along and filmed an idea a whole lot like mine! Man, that’s a bummer. The coincidences between that spot and mine are just crazy, aren’t they? When 4000 people each try and come up with an idea for a commercial for the same product there’s obviously going to be some overlap, but damn, there’s a lot of overlap here. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of CTSB entries that have really similar ideas. (For instance, how many Doritos-as-a-paper-football and dorito-loving-zombies spots have you watched in the last few weeks?) But of the 2200 or so Crash entries I’ve watched, I don’t think there are two of them that share more common elements than these two casket-full-of-doritos entries. I mean, it’s not just that both videos are funeral scenes. It’s that both videos include:
1. A dead man’s last wish to be buried in a casket full of Doritos
2. A funeral for that guy that turns out to be fake
3. A big, framed photo of the “dead” guy enjoying a bag of Doritos next to the casket
4. Shots of that guy in his casket buried up to his face in chips
5. A climax in which the “dead” guy gets his comeuppance when the casket of chips is knocked over
That’s sort of a lot of similarities to squeeze into 30 seconds, isn’t it? I have to wonder, what the heck happened here? Is this just a case of really bad luck or is the CIA monitoring my brainwaves as part of some kind of scheme to control the masses via secret messages hidden in a superbowl commercial? There’s no chance that another team of filmmakers were somehow (gulp) inspired by my entry, is there?
My entry, Rest in Chips was uploaded on Friday, November 6th and the other video, The Casket, appeared online a few days later. I might be paranoid but I’m not crazy enough to think that the makers of the other entry saw Rest In Chips and then ran out the next day and rented a church so they could make their own version of my spot. So I was left with only one conclusion; this was just a giant coincidence…nothing more.
But then it finally hit me; I am an idiot. After I wrote my script I created and animated storyboard so I could see if I could fit my entire idea into 30 seconds. On October 6th, I uploaded that storyboard animation on to youtube. Then I sent the link to a few people and asked for ideas and feedback. During that time, the video was set to “public” and could be seen by anyone. One of my friends even said to me “why did you put that on youtube? What if someone steals your idea!?” And I laughed and laughed at that notion. And then I stopped laughing because I realized I had made a very stupid mistake. I named the video “Doritos Storyboard.” Because the word “Doritos” was in the title, any CTSB contestant who went to youtube to study last year’s winning entries or actual Doritos commercials could have found and watched my storyboard.
I’ve been burned by plagiarism before so I went back to youtube and deleted the storyboard. But by then it had already been up for like a week. A few days later, I changed some of the dialogue in my script and created a slightly tweaked version of the animated storyboard. On October 12th I uploaded that video to youtube except I named this one simply “dortest” so that it would be hidden from youtube’s search engine. It’s still online. Here it is:
I hate to think the worst of people like this but if you think I’m going overboard, try a little experiment. Open The Casket in one window and my storyboard video in the other. Then hit “Play” on them as fast as you can so you can watch them simultaneously. The shots line up better than Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. I can maybe understand that two separate filmmakers could come up with the same ideas, but what are the odds they’d use the same site gags at the same moments??
I really have no idea what to think about this. I know it’s just speculation on my part but I think I might have declare shenanigans on the makers of The Casket. At the very least, I think it’s plausible that somewhere out there, another filmmaker who was planning on entering the CTSB contest went on to youtube and searched for “Dortios” related videos. If they “Sorted by date,” my storyboard would have been right up in their face. The storyboard seems too crazy to ever shoot (seriously, what kind of a nut would get a real casket and have a real grave dug?) so maybe they assumed it would never really be filmed and so the concept was fair game.
Or maybe it was the CIA. I dunno. At this point I’m pretty open to any possibilities.
1/6/2010 UPDATE: Well, Doritos announced their Top 6 finalists on Monday and I was extremely disappointed to see that “The Casket” made the cut. For making the top 6 they receive $25,000, a trip to the superbowl and a chance to see their ad air during the game. If their ad does air, they could win a bonus of up to 2 million dollars.
After writing this blog post I contacted Doritos and informed them of my plagiarism concerns and explained the situation. I received a response saying that the Doritos legal team would look into the matter.
So even though the company’s lawyers knew there might be a chance the idea was stolen the judges decided to choose it anyway. Since 40% of a video’s score was based on “originality” I cannot understand how “The Casket” could have gotten a high enough score to make the Top 6. There were 4000 entries. Common sense tells you that a fair judging system would yield many videos that were just fractions of a point away from making the top 6. So a serious deduction in any category should theoretically sink any videos chances.
Now that Doritos has chosen “Casket” as a finalist, a new and even bigger problem has presented itself. Even if the idea was not stolen from me, “Casket” should have been disqualified because it infringes on my copyright. Copyright infringement can happen on accident but that does not give the infringer a free pass to benefit from their actions. Unintentional copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. My storyboard animation for “Rest in Chips” was first posted to the web the first week in October. The version that is on youtube now was uploaded October 12th. On October 29th I posted the first rough cut of my entry to my youtube channel. It, and several other rough cuts are still there. That first rough cut was on line 4 days before “Casket” was even filmed. And finally, my entry was uploaded to the contest site well before “Casket” was.
This all means that I am the owner and creator of the “Dead man has his last wish to be buried in chips fulfilled but during the funeral he is revealed to be alive inside the casket full of chips that gets knocked over” story idea. If a commercial was running on TV right now that was as similar to “Casket” as my entry, storyboard and rough cuts are, the judges would never have been able to select “Casket” as a finalist because Doritos would be sued for IP theft and copyright infringement regardless of whether or not the concept was intentionally stolen. My rights as an independent filmmaker are the same as a multi-million dollar corporation. Just because my storyboard or entry have not aired on TV, it does not mean my Intellectual Property rights don’t count.
Since Doritos knew that I was concerned about plagiarism and since they knew that I have proof that I was the first person to publicly release this idea, I feel personally offended that they chose to ignore my rights and concerns. Back in the newspaper days, they used to say “never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink buy the barrel.” Let’s update that statement for the modern age and say that you should “never pick a fight with a filmmaker who has a blog and nothing to lose.”
More details about these new developments here: http://videocontestnews.com/2010/01/04/one-of-the-crash-the-superbowl-finalists-revealed-early/ and here: http://videocontestnews.com/2010/01/05/doritos-2010-crash-the-superbowl-finalists/
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Hey, at least you posted yours first right? The judges probably will take that into consideration.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they didn’t steal your idea. But your spot is funnier! Good luck. We entered, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr-7ioJCt3I
ideas are like fine crystal. very precious and fragile and rare. and people will steal them!
you were ripped off.
Hey Beardy,
Let me play the devils advocate here. I saw an additional spot in the gallery that had to do with a guy who is in a coffin but not dead and he is surrounded by relatives and he enjoys doritos chips. I actually thought it was closer to your spot than this one. I will offer, why it could be more of a coincidence than I.P.Theft.
1. In the comparison video, no one hates this guy. He actually has buddies who are envious of him.
2. The coffin falling over in the church is a gofaw of the dude himself (not the result of being kicked).
3. And this one is critical Beardy: In the competition video the motive to die/disappear is so he could be alone with his precious Doritos. In yours, the motivation was to get back at relatives, as he calls them “Losers”. Yes, he enjoys a chip at the end of his admonition to his lineage, but that single (and well done by the way) bite of a chip, does not compare to the ecstasy expressed by the dude in the other coffin while watching football.
Branding 101-show love for the brand.
Yes, he very well could have ripped off your idea, but it is also possible that he suspects the same of you. He might right at this moment be going over his list of confidants who were in his inner creative circle and trying to figure out which one betrayed him.
I will also offer that, it is not uncommon for a spot with that much pre-production to take a few months to execute from beginning to end, especially if he is calling in favors instead of paying for things outright.
Don’t hate me Beardy, just trying to play the other side and maybe give some perspective.
Jared
Dude I would say you were likely ripped off particularly since the other video has only a few hits and it is good which tells me it may likely have been posted late since it probably did not go through the “latest addition” category.
There are a lot of guys with lots of money and resources but void of ideas. So they probably came across your idea and ran with it. You should contact Doritos and make them aware of your situation so this type of thing doesn’t become common.
I’d be pretty pissed if I were you.
Good luck.
Oh yeah and don’t be suckered by these guys saying “it really is different” or “yours is better”. Sorry to say but they are very very close and their spot is slicker and better executed than yours. Plain and simple I would theorize they took your idea and made a better spot.
Jared,
All constructive feedback is good and I appreciate the comment. I understand that both spots have significant differences. Most notably, one spot features a guy who faked his death so that he could hide out with some Doritos and the other features a guy who faked his death so that he could decide which, if any of his family members deserved to inherit his Doritos. I don’t in any way feel that the makers of “The Casket” set out to shoot their own version of my spot word for word. But based on the circumstantial evidence, I think it is possible that they may have seen my storyboard and appropriated its key elements (a funeral, a last wish to be buried in Doritos, a faked death, a guy in a casket full of loose chips, a photo of the guy with a bag of Doritos and a climax featuring the crashing and spilling of that casket.)
I think I did see the other funeral spot you mentioned. In the entry I’m thinking of, several mourners pass by the casket of their deceased friend and place mini-bags of Doritos in the coffin. If I’m remembering correctly, it ends with one guy coming along and taking out one of the bags. When you compare that spot with my entry, you see that at most they only share two significant elements; a funeral and Doritos in a casket. But I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that they really share the “Doritos in a casket” element. In my spot there were hundreds of loose Doritos covering the “dead” guys’s entire body as part of his last wish. In the other, a few bags of Doritos are left in the casket as a tribute. I also don’t think that they guy is “alive” in both spots. I might be remembering it wrong but I think in the other entry, it was implied that the guy was a zombie or that he momentarily came back to life to protect his bag of Doritos.
So while all three spots I’ve mentioned are set during funerals, I don’t think anyone could really argue that my entry and the entry you mentioned (where the people line up to put bags of chips in a coffin) are two creatures that evolved from the same animal. They might both have 4 legs and fur but one is a horse and one is a cow. To continue the analogy, both my entry and “the casket” share so many unique factors (the defining elements that make them what they are) that looking at them both is like looking at a horse and a zebra. They are clearly not the same animal but logic compels us to at least suspect that their similarities aren’t coincidental.
This is making me think of one of the best entries of this year’s competition; “Doritos Please.”
http://www.crashthesuperbowl.com/#/video/1614
That video is hands down one of the top 6 BEST entries submitted in this year’s competition. It’s amazing. But….I don’t think it will make the finals. It can’t and it shouldn’t because as great as it is, it comes off as a “most interesting man in the world” rip-off. Stylistically, “Doritos Please” and the “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials are incredibly different. But when you look at the two together, it seems as if the makers of “Doritos Please” took some crucial elements from the Dos Equis commercials (world-traveling latin guy, many shots of him doing crazy feats.) It’s quite possible that they could have copied these elements subconsciously since the “Most Interesting Man” spots are so ubiquitous that their featured character has become an over-night, cool guy archetype. But whatever happened, if that spot airs during the superbowl, many viewers’ gut reaction will be “they ripped off The Most Interesting man in the world!”
Artistic plagiarism is never really black and white. It’s usually subtle. Most plagiarists take other people’s ideas and then try and change them enough so that no one catches on to what they’ve done. But I should reiterate that I have absolutely no solid evidence that the makers of “The Casket” have ever seen my spot or the rough cuts and storyboards I posted to youtube in October. This could indeed just be a gigantic set of coincidences.
Hey Dan,
All points well taken. Again though, and I think you are correct that we really have to know a few different items before we can even start to think about trotting down the plagiarism road. Among these are the date they started pre-prod. But, please indulge me while I offer a bit more objective opinion.
STORY DISPOSTION:
In the case of the actual writing of the dialogue (emotion), the two stories could not be more different.
1. In your story, the underlying emotion is hatred, betrayal and violence. The Uncle hates his family. The family hates the Uncle. The nephew kicks the coffin and effectively ‘kills’ the old coot.
2. In the other story “Casket”. The casket dude is showing love for football, massive love for Doritos. No one hates him! In fact his buddies on the outside really admire (love) him and are willing to go to bat for him. In the end, casket dude ‘lives’.
Dan, these two stories are very, very different and I think that the brand will def. recognize the contrast. I know I do. If they like the sarcasm, anger, death angle over the “It’s a Miracle” feel, than you are still golden buddy.
Jared AKA The VCK
Jared,
Someone left a comment on one of the versions of “The Casket” that said “—- the actor is awesome!” or something like that. So I googled the actor’s name and found his twitter page. He doesn’t twitter very often but on November 1st he posted a tweet saying that he was in a church filming a spec commercial. So I don’t know when pre-production began on that spot but they did film it just a week before the deadline. By that time I had already shot my entry and posted rough cuts to my youtube page. (not that that means much) Maybe they had been in pre-production for 6 weeks but that seems unlikely. I managed to get a location, a casket, a director of photography, a crane, 5 actors, 10 extras, a dozen grave stones, and a giant hole dug in the ground in about 3 weeks and I’m just one guy.
I understand that “The Casket” shows a guy’s love for Doritos and mine is darker. But which spot is better or which one shows more respect for the brand or which one is upbeat and which one is a bummer isn’t what’s troubling me. And I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think that if “The Casket” doesn’t make the finals, my video somehow will get to take their place. That seems very unlikely and that is not my goal. My goal is to figure out whether or not I was ripped off….even if it was just a little.
The makers of the casket would have to be crazy to just copy my concept word for word. So of course their video and my video feature different story elements. But just because some elements are different that doesn’t mean that the similar elements weren’t plagiarized. Once again, I have zero concrete evidence and I might be besmirching the rep of some innocent filmmakers but the circumstantial evidence is strong enough that I felt compelled to lay it all out in public.
I think you should be rooting for the other guys to win. If they do, you can sue them AND doritos. you;d have to be retarded not to see that there are wau too many simmilarites between your storyboard and their video for it to be coincidence. show this evidence to a jury and you’d win. but the other video is actually sort of dumb and the people in it are unlikeable so i don’t think it has much a of a shot at getting to the superbowl.
Hey Beardy,
All of your points are well taken. So are Ryan’s. In playing the devils advocate I am just wanting to make sure you think this through. In light of the twitter revelation, I would continue to collect evidence and for sure, if the competing spot gets chosen as a finalist, you might be able to find a decent attorney to take this on pro bono.
After all, there is always the chance that plagiarism did occur here. Just make sure your gun is loaded, the safety is off and you are willing to shoot if you are going to point it at someone. Heck, it just end up being a heck of a payday…..and a cool resulting blog post.
The VCK
I’d really hate to be the jerk who threw a monkey wrench into the Crash the Superbowl campaign so I’m not sure how I’d proceed if the other entry made it to the finals. If it turned out that the idea was plagiarized, I wouldn’t be super concerned with the money. I’d be much more upset about the glory and the credit. Plus, if the CTSB contest comes back next year my hope is to make it my top creative priority of the fall and actually try and win it. But if I started threatening people with lawyers this year that’d probably kill my CTSB chances for good.
Nobody said it would be fair….life that is.
[...] sales on usatoday.com today. This….is not good. As some of you frequent readers may know, I was worried “The Casket” might get to the finals because I suspect that the makers of that entry may have [...]
[...] in a casket full of Doritos that gets knocked over. As I explained in yesterday’s post and this post from November 19th, I suspect that I might be the victim of plagiarism. If you watch both entries [...]
This just proves this whole contest was rigged. Your point about the originality score is dead on. Hope you know a good lawyer because you have a case my friend.
Doritos took advantage of you just as Doritos took advantage of all the filmmakers that entered the contest this year. They heard your concerns but just didn’t care. Who are you to tell doritos what to do? They made up their minds and it wouldn’t mattered if you presented them with a truckload of evidence. hey would have just done what they wanted because who cares what you think.
As someone who submitted an entry, I expected doritos to judge the contest fairly. It’s obvious that they didn’t. On behalf of all of us losers I hope you show these people that they can’t use of then ignore us when we complain about getting screwed.
Have you thought about taking this story to the media? I bet they’d eat it up. If you sent a link to Boingboing I bet they’d do a post about it. And if Boingboing covered this, everyone would know about it in a week. Boingboing does a lot of posts about copyright issues too. They usually take the “fair use” side of the argument but because it’s a big company that might be screwing a little guy, I bet they’d cover it.
[...] a coffin full of Doritos. Hey, even Homer Simpson didn’t think of that one!” (lol, but I did!- [...]
im with you dan!
i think they stole your idea.
[...] do. I blogged about it. I first compared the two ads in this blog post from November 19th: A Tale of Two Caskets (full of Doritos.) Since “Casket” was so slickly produced, I was worried right from the start that it might make [...]