A still from my semi-winning video

Every once in a while I will come across a video contest that I know I can win.  And that was the case with DoUpTo.com’s $15,000 Video Challenge.  Unlike most video contests, this one wasn’t about making a commercial or getting a bunch of votes.  This was strictly a challenge-based competition.  The contest would be broken up into two parts:  In round one, people had to shoot a funny video about a giraffe.  (The sponsor’s mascot is a giraffe)  The five contestants whose giraffe videos received the most views during the month of September would advance to the second round.  In round two, the finalists had 10 days to get video of DoUpTo.com’s logo as high as possible.  The person who got the logo highest would win $15,000.

And that was it.  After I read the rules I knew I could get enough views to get into the finals and I knew exactly how to get the sponsor’s logo higher than any one else.  There would be no luck this time around.  To win, it would only take skill and a lot of work.  That fifteen grand was as good as mine!

Or maybe not.  For some reason, fate decided to totally jerk me around and make this “sure thing” hilariously difficult to attain.  I mean, it got pretty freaking ridiculous.  My ingenious plan to get the company’s logo really, really high sort of led to a federal investigation and in the end, two other finalists did the exact same thing I did.  Here’s how it all went down….

Round one was easy.  I knew I could get a lot of views thanks to this website so I figured I would breeze into the Top 5.  I headed to brookfield zoo one afternoon, got some footage of the giraffes, dubbed in some wacky voices and boom…my first round entry was done.  Here it is.   I actually think it’s pretty damn funny:
 

 
I was so sure that I would make the finals that about two weeks before the view-count deadline I started preparing for Round Two.  DoUpTo’s website made it sound like they expected most of the finalists to take the logo to the top of a tall building or maybe a mountain.  So from the second I read the rules for this contest I knew how to win it.  I would send that f$%#ing logo space.  Well, “near space” actually.  Ever since I saw Toshiba’s “Space Chair” commercial I have been waiting for an excuse to send a camera and a weather balloon into the upper atmosphere.  And now a $15,000 excuse had just fallen into my lap!

My friends thought I was nuts but I knew it would work.  A weather balloon can get about 100,000 feet above the earth before it pops.  I figured none of the other contestants would have the balls (or frankly the know-how) to try something like that. (Turns out I was right.)  So I spent weeks researching other people’s near-space launches before I started ordering the gear I would need.  Hey, did you know you could buy a freaking weather balloon on Amazon.com for only about 50 bucks!?  Turns out you can.  I also ordered one of those little GoPro cameras, a Spot personal GPS tracker, a heavy-duty mini-parachute and a small, think-walled cooler that is meant to store medicine.  I put everything together, added a couple of fins to keep the craft from spinning too much and my near-space ship was complete.  The pink and brown duct tape I used to seal the white Styrofoam box inspired me to dub my contraption the Neapolitan I.

yum.

I shoved a long dowel through the craft and attached the DoUpTo logo to the end of it.  Because I like to make things more difficult than they have to be, I also added a heavy-ass toy giraffe.  Sure, it totally screwed up the weight but the idea of sending a “giraffe” into space just seemed adorable to me.  In honor of a Chris Parnell’s character on 30 Rock, I named my giraffe astronaut Dr. Leo Spaceman.  If everything worked as planned, I’d wind up with footage of the logo and Dr. Spaceman floating 18 miles above the surface of the Earth.

To quote Dr. Spaceman, "Science is whatever we want it to be!"

Now it was time to go to space!  On a beautiful Saturday afternoon my friends and I trekked from the suburbs of Chicago to Hebron, Indiana.  The wind was so still that my projections said the craft would only travel about 20 miles away from the launch point.  But I didn’t want to risk having the thing land in the middle of Midway Airport or something so we tried to get as far away from Chicagoland as possible.

Not a bad way to spend an Autumn afternoon

The Amazon listing for the weather balloon I bought said it would take 50 cubic feet of helium to fill it.  So I rented a tank that held 50 cubic feet of helium.  But the listing was wrong.  That thing needed 100 Cubic feet to lift a 4 pound payload.  So one member of my team had to drive to the nearest Party City (which wasn’t near at all!) to get more helium.  This put us behind by about 2 hours.  The sun was starting to set but the balloon was half-filled so there was no turning back.  We launched at about 4:30PM.  Then we went to Hooters to wait for the thing to come back to Earth.

Turns out that waiting for your space balloon to return from the upper atmosphere is pretty stressful, especially if you’re going to lose out on winning $15K if the thing disappears.  I could barely enjoy my buffalo shrimp I was so nervous.  By 6:00PM it was really dark out which meant that we might not get much usable footage.  Other than that, everything seemed to be going to plan.  We were tracking the craft’s progress on my laptop (the waitresses were all impressed by our nerdy adventure) and I could see that the balloon traveled north for about 45 minutes and then it started zooming West.  That meant it had hit the jet stream!  And after 60 minutes, the GPS signal went dead.  That was actually a great sign because GPS trackers don’t work above 60,000 feet.  Weather balloons rise at a rate of 1,000 feet per minute so I expected we’d lose contact after an hour. 

An hour went by with no contact…and then two hours went by.  Something had to be wrong.  I was sure the craft was gone forever.  Just as we were about to get on the expressway and head back to Illinois, the signal returned!  That meant that the balloon had popped above 100,000 feet and now the parachute was bringing the payload back to Earth.

Just one problem; the payload was floating right towards Lake Michigan.  Every 10 minutes the GPS signal would update and the thing just kept going and going and going.  But finally, the signal stopped moving.  Amazingly, the craft landed just 1/2 mile short of the lake.  We could tell from the GPS tracker that the ship was in an industrial area near Gary, IN.  Now, if you’ve ever been to Gary, IN you know that it’s not really a place you want to visit on a saturday night.  After all, every few year Gary does manage to win the title of the “Murder Capital of the US.”  But we looked at satellite photos of the area and the GPS signal was coming from a desolate, industrial area.  We found the general region and started driving in circles.  It was like we were lost in the middle of some post apocalyptic industrial wasteland.  But then, a lucky break!  My cell phone rang.  I had put my number on the craft so I knew someone had found it….

And here’s where the story takes a mysterious turn.  I’m not allowed to tell you who called me or where they were calling from.  It turns out that my little craft had landed someplace bad….someplace VERY bad.  It landed on property that belonged to a large, multi-national corporation.  And large multi-national corporations don’t like it went some knucklehead drops a weird looking recording device in their backyard.  Even though my friend and I were right outside the front gates, they said they couldn’t just hand over the ship.  Instead, they were going to launch and investigation and call in the FAA.

Initially I was just bummed because the company’s investigation meant it would take a few days to get my equipment back.  But that turned out to be the least of my problems.  When Monday morning came I talked to the head of security at the plant and I learned some very scary things.  The anonymous corporation’s facilities on Lake Michigan are actually important enough that the government considers them to be a potential target for terrorist attacks.  They are protected by the Federal something-or-other act (my brain went numb when the term “homeland security” came up) and it is a federal crime to videotape inside the facility.  So, get the problem here?  My freaking ship had a video camera in it.  The camera’s battery should have been dead by the time the craft hit the ground.  But if it wasn’t….oh boy.  Technically I would have violated a federal anti-terrorism law.  Oh, and that wasn’t the only problem.  The whole area around the factory is restricted airspace!  Why is that airspace restricted?  Well, I can’t really tell you that either.  Let’s just say that there is something else right next to that factory and a random floating boxes are not welcome there.

So instead of winning $15,000 it was looking like I might wind up getting fined or worse.  The days rolled by and the deadline was getting closer and closer. The stress was eating me alive. I was waiting to hear if I was going to get fined, I was waiting to hear if was going to get charged with a crime, I was waiting to find out if I would get my equipment back and I was waiting to see if my camera recorded and usable footage. Finally, the security guys at the factory decided to let the FAA decide what my fate would be.  A team went to the factory, looked at my craft and knew right away what I was doing.  I had done my research before the launch and I knew that if the balloon’s payload weighed less than 6 pounds, FAA regulations wouldn’t apply.  My craft weighed 4 pounds so the FAA guys said the security guys should just let me have it.  As far as the law was concerned, my ship was basically a harmless toy.

So after days of waiting, I finally got my stuff back. The security guys at the factory were scary on the phone but super nice in person. They told me that I had been the talk of the plant all week. They returned the ship in mint condition.  It didn’t look like it had been to the upper atmosphere and back.  I cracked it open and was relived to discover that the camera did work and it did record some usable footage.  (It also stopped recording about thirty minutes before it hit the ground.)  So just before the Round Two deadline, I submitted this video as proof that I had gotten the DoUpTo logo at least 100,000 feet in the air:
 

 
After I submitted the video I was pretty goddamn proud of myself.  I had sent the logo to space and there was no way anyone else could top me!  It was a pretty sweet feeling.  And that feeling lasted for about two whole hours.  Now that the video was done I got back to my normal life.  For the first time in about two weeks, I logged into my youtube account and waiting for me was a big, fat bowl of bummer.  Check out the message that I had missed:

Hello,

I understand you are a finalist in a video competition. (If this is incorrect, please forgive this email, and ignore it)

I could get your logo to between 100,000 ft to 115,000 ft above sea level (with the objective of getting it as high as possible). The cost would be $2000 (the price of one of our kits with the radios), which would go towards another kit for my students. The winds in Houston are great for a launch this weekend. I could launch as early as this weekend, but payment would have to be made before the flight via paypal. If the flight failed for some reason, I would give a full refund. 1080p video or 5MP still photos (or both) with whatever logo you want on the payload. We specialize in stabilized pictures and video (other people’s payloads spin wildly at altitude).

www.ProjectAether.org

Best regards,
Ben

Benjamin Longmier, Ph.D.
Adjunct Faculty
Physics Department
University of Houston
blongmier@***.edu
281-526-****

I was crushed….not because I could have just hired someone to do a balloon launch but because I knew this opportunistic a-hole would have sent the same message to all of the finalists.  I’m guessing this Ben Longmier, guy tried to get into the finals but didn’t make it.  So he decided to try and make some money off of the desperate finalists.  ($2,000 up front for the launch is ridiculous!  I only spent about $600 in total)  I wanted to fly to Houston and whip this guy’s ass for butting into something that was none of his business.  It would turn out that Dr. Ben wound up costing me $10,000.  I contacted him and he confirmed that he did do a launch for another finalist.  Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, I quickly realized that Dr. Ben’s business, “Project Aether” is the one I bought my balloon from on Amazon.  So he’s the guy whose Amazon ad said the Balloon would take 50 cubic feet of Helium instead of 100!

I contacted the judges at DoUpTo and their responses were weird and cryptic.  The company is headquartered in Israel and English was a second language for everyone I talked too.   So it was kind of hard to deal with them.  I told them I knew that another contestant had hired a professional balloon guy to do a launch for them and I asked if there was a chance there would be a tie.  The guy I talked to kept giving me hints that the judges liked my video better and that I was the winner.  (lots of winky-smiley faces in his e-mails)  He said that if there was going to be a tie, the finalists would be notified ahead of time.  And then about a week and a half ago I got a weird phone call from a “journalist” who happened to have an Israeli accent.  He said he was working on a story about DoUpto.com and he wanted to come to my house and interview me about the contest.  And he was adamant that we meet at my house.  I’m not an idiot so I knew that I was about to get “surprised” with a giant, fake novelty check for $15,000.  I was a very happy boy for the next week.

And then, the big moment came.  Last Wednesday at about 9:00AM there was a knock at my door.  I opened it to find two Israeli men pointing video cameras at me.  One of them was doing a very bad job of hiding a big fake check.  I beamed as the guy explained that he was from DoUpTo.com and he was glad to inform me that I was “one of the winners of DoUpto.com’s video challenge.”  As he turned the giant check around, the smile fell right off my face.  Worst case scenario I thought there would be a tie between me and the guy who hired that jerk in Houston.  But the check was for $5,000.  Somehow the contest had ended in a three-way tie.

I must have looked pretty crushed because the DoUpto guys asked me to open the door again and look happier when I saw the check.  They eventually came in and we talked and they explained what happened.  Three finalists wound up sending the logo up on a weather balloon.  I did it and a 15 year old kid in Vancouver hired the physicist in Houston to do a launch for him.  But a third guy in Helsinki must have been inspired by Dr. Ben’s e-mail so he hired a team in the UK to do a launch for him.  Here are the other two winning videos.  First, here is the one that was filmed by the team in UK for the Helsinki guy:
 

 
And here is the one that Dr. Ben shot.  It’s the best looking video of the bunch.  Skip ahead to the 2:02 mark for some surprise cleavage:
 

 
$5,000 ain’t nothing to sneeze at and I’m really glad that I won something for my efforts.  But it does bum me out that two other finalists were basically able to just buy a piece of the grand prize.  Seriously, what kind of 15 year old has $2,000 to spend on a weather balloon launch?  But like I said, $5,000 is still pretty damn good.  Plus I had a crazy amount of fun!  Yeah it was stressful but I’m proud that I was able to pull it off.  And I am REALLY glad I’m not one of the unlucky finalists who didn’t win anything.  The other contestants spent serious cash trying to get the logo up high.  One girl hired someone to film the logo on Mount Everest for Christsakes.  And another guy jumped out of a plane from five kilometers up.  All of the finalists spent at least 2 months participating in this contest so I’m surprised doupto didn’t give everyone a little something as a thank you. You can see the valiant but futile efforts of the other finalists here:  http://doupto.com/15k-winners