And now for something completely different….
As I said yesterday, if Crash the Superbowl was your first video contest experience, it shouldn’t be your last. Giant piles of money are just sitting out there on the web waiting to be claimed by any filmmaker willing to put in a little time and effort. I was stunned by the level of quality I saw in some of this year’s Doritos entries. If many of the filmmakers who participated in The Crash were to recycle their Doritos ideas for other video contests they’d walk away with plenty of big prizes.
Smaller money contests are definitely worth your time and energy because they are way, way easier to WIN than the big-money, high-profile competitions. Recently, a company called AMC technology held a video contest to promote their “Solutions for the Call Center” services. Because the company required that a lot of specific, technical info be included in the entries, only about 7 people entered. But AMC gave out three prizes: $2,500, 1,500 and $1,000. So anyone who entered at almost a 50% chance of winning some cash.
The theme of the contest was to show how AMC could help a business during the hectic holiday season. Here’s the winner:
First Place. Prize: $2,500.
Heh, heh. Guess what? That was my entry! Last year me and a friend went to a pub crawl called “SantaCon” where everyone dressed as Santas. So I had access to several santa suits. I bought one more, paid a few extras 30 bucks each to put the suits on and march around an office and kerblamo….2,500 bucks. The writing was tough because of all the tech-talk but the shoot only took about 2 hours. Editing probably took three. Max I put 15 hours into this. Tally all that up and I made $166 per hour (pre-tax.) Not to shabby. About a week and a half ago, I found out I won 3,500 in another contest so 2010 is only 8 days old and I’ve already got 6 Grand in checks coming to me thanks to video-contesting. So if you’re one of the 4,000 people who didn’t make it to the Crash the superbowl finals, quick feeling sorry for yourselves and making anti-Doritos facebook pages. Grab your camera and find a contest that is a little easier to win.
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How do you find all of these contests? They never seem to exist until the last moment. :/
~Robert C.
Robert,
I have two favorite websites for that:
http://onlinevideocontests.com/
http://films4prizes.com/
Both of those sites list tons of contest. What I like to do is “sort by date due” and then look for contests that have deadlines about 2 weeks away. By that point the contests have been running for weeks so I check out what videos have been posted. If I don’t see any clear winners, I start writing. If no clear winners have been posted a week before the deadline I’ll shoot and submit something. A lot of times I will shoot just a day or two before the submission period ends.
Congrats Beardy, You’re on a roll! I know it’s kind if geeky but I’m always curious about the equipment people use. What camera and editing software do you use?
Andy,
I always like hearing what people use too. I use a DVX-100B….which I don’t actually recommend for video contests. I bought it because I shoot documentaries. The footage looks good on a TV but I never have been happy with the look of the videos when I post them to the web. Ia actually was pretty disappointed with the way this AMC video looks. We shot super fast and I didn’t want to spend time putting up lights. So I had to adjust some colors and brightness in editing. Without a lot of light, it’s easy to mess up your footage with a DVX. For editing I use a very old version of adobe premiere that I like very much. It’s super simple to use. I bought Final Cut Express last year and haven’t used it to edit one thing yet.
My non-HD videos are going to start looking old fashioned when they go up against more and more HD videos. So I have to upgrade to HD soon. Problem is, I’d want an HD camera that I could also use for documentaries. That means spending a lot of cash.