Just before Christmas, Mofilm revealed the finalists in Chevy’s Route 66 Super Bowl commercial contest. This mega-competition was open to filmmakers from all over the world and the winning ad will play during the 2012 SuperBowl. The top filmmaker will also receive $25,000 Actually, there are a bunch of cash prizes at stake and there will be different winners from different regions of the globe.
So how are the winners determined? A public vote…right? Wrong! Though the video gallery is full of ways you can “like” or share the finalists, views and votes will have no impact on which videos will win. Judges have the final say in all stages of this contest which is the only way a contest like this should be run. The only reason that companies bother with public votes is because it’s a free and easy form of publicity. But Mofilm came up with a very clever way to get that cheap social media coverage without diluting the integrity of their contest. They are running a side competition where the “Top Sharer” of the chosen commercials will win $10,000. Basically whoever directs the most viewers to the contest site wins. If you want to try and get in on that action, head here.
I’ve watched all 32 finalist commercials and they range from pretty bad to pretty awesome. There are a few ads that seem like they only made it this far because they were the only decent entries that came out of a particular region. But I’d say at least 80% of the finalist spots are very strong. Here are two of my favorites. Click the images to view:
Keys by Charles Hayes, USA: From Mofilm: Every key has a purpose…and every production has its challenges. Fim Fact: On day one our producer had her car broken into and all the props stolen. But, from the moment we came up with this we knew we had something touching, so through torrential rain, home made jibs and lots of favours, we pushed through and produced something we all love!
Keys
Cindy, I Love You by Jude Chun, Korea: From Mofilm: A man goes above and beyond, determined to finish one last item on a bucket list.
Cindy, I Love You
Keys is so professional that it could start airing on TV today and no one would ever suspect it was shot for a video contest. Cindy, I Love You is pretty weird and the twist at the end is a little grim and heavy-handed but for some reason I just really like it. Like I said, there are a bunch of good submissions and you should take a few minutes to scroll through Mofilm’s beautiful video gallery. (Seriously, its classy and clean design puts Doritos obnoxious and loud Crash the Super Bowl gallery to shame.) But if you only have time to watch one of these ads, watch this one:
Chevy Driving Academy by Kenneth Wales & Jason Lansing, USA: From Mofilm: A man is put to the test to see if he has what it takes to become a Chevy driver. Film Fact: The shoot was as intense as the Driving Academy – the actor almost threw up after multiple takes from flipping upside-down, it took 4 hours to hit the mark when shooting the Corvette and the Dealer was never meant to be bald…until they met Amazon!
Chevy Driving Academy
Pretty damn good, huh? I’ll be amazed if that one doesn’t win the top prize. To view all of the Chevy finalists, head here: http://chevroletroute66.msn.com
Last week, the new video contest hosting site Highly Humorous launched their third ever contest so I thought I’d take a second and do a quick update on their progress. It’s really interesting to watch a new site like this as it evolves. Right now, HH is just running small contests of their own so they can develop a strong talent base before they start running contests for outside companies. I’m not sure if they came up with that idea on their own but I know that Poptent started the same way. I looked at some of the first assignments that site ever ran and they were stuff like “make an ad for a fictional cell phone company!”
Highly Humorous’ newest contest is also for a fictional company; 48 Hour Energy. That’s an energy drink that keeps you wired for two days straight. I like these test contests because filmmakers are allowed to be irreverent and kind of crazy since there’s no actual sponsor to offend. The deadline to enter the 48 Hour Energy contest is December 22nd and the top prize is $1,000. More info here.
Highly Humorous also recently announced the winners of the “SuperHero” test contest and you can see all the results here. There were some decent entries but I think my favorite was this video that came in third:
Click to view.
I’m not sure how much longer HH plans to do these “test” contests but I’ve been talking to some of the guys running the site and they seem to have some big plans for 2012. I don’t think this is officially official but it seems like soon HH will be running contests for outside companies where the prizes will be in the $5,000. So, HH will be a site to keep an eye on in the new year.
Hey folks, It’s your BFF for life Beardy, here. Every year we see a giant spike in traffic thanks to our coverage of the Crash the Super Bowl contest and I always like to do a quick post welcoming our new readers to the site. And man, did we get a lot of new readers last month! During the summer I made some SEO changes to VCN that caused traffic to increase by about 300%. So when you throw a bunch of CTSB traffic on top of those figures the results are pretty amazing. November 2011 turned out to be our biggest month ever with 13,901 Unique Visitors. To quote the great Charles Dickens, that shite is redonkulous!
Here are few other random things I want to mention:
If you’re here for Crash the SuperBowl info, we’ll be running a whole bunch of posts about the contest over the next 2 1/2 months. Next week we’ll even be featuring an interview with one of the 2011 CTSB finalists. And of course, we’ll post the Top 5 videos (along with reviews and analysis) as soon as Doritos makes the results public.
Next I want to say Thanks to all the filmmakers out there that sent in the links to their Doritos entries. I’ve decided to extend my “free mini-review offer” for a few more days. So far, I’ve crtiqued more than 100 submissions and I am pretty sure that at least one or two of the videos I’ve seen will wind up making the finals. If you’d still like to get a mini-review of your ad, please post the link in the comment section of this article: videocontestnews.com/2011/11/21/we-want-to-see-your-crash-the-super-bowl-entries/
As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to do the impossible this month. I’m trying to watch at least a few seconds of every, single Crash the Super Bowl entry. (By the way, there were just under 5,000 submissions this year.) My goal is to compile a list of the 50 or so best submissions. The list will be posted on December 14th.
If you’re a new reader, I just want to mention that Video Contest News is a year-round operation. We run two or three posts a week about different contests. If you’re having a problem with a contest, let us know! Companies hate bad publicity and a single article about a crappy contest can sometimes inspire the sponsors to fix whatever has gone wrong. Or hey, you can even let us know if you have some good news to report! We post a lot of winning entries so if you’ve recently won a nice contest prize, I want to hear about it. You can reach me here: VideoContestNews@gmail.com.
Finally, if you like you can only stand to read 140 characters of video contest news at a time, follow us on twitter here. This month we’ll be “following back” all of our new followers!
It’s been about a week now since the submission period for the 2012 Crash the Super Bowl contest closed and in total it looks like Doritos recived 4,829 entries. That’s an all time record. Sure, some of those submissions are duplicates but not many. This year the Doritos team did a great job of keeping the repeat submissions out of the contest gallery. In fact, I’d estimate that only 1% of this year’s ads are duplicates. If we ignore the fact that a few of the entries are repeats, a little math tells us that your odds of making the Top Five are 1 in 965. That makes this year’s Crash the Super Bowl the most difficult video contest to win, EVER. So if you entered this year and if you have friends that are really psyched about your chances, you might want to mention the “1 in 965″ odds to them so they won’t be too crushed if you don’t make the finals.
As I explained in my previous post, this year I’m trying to watch (at least a few seconds of) every, single CTSB entry. My goal is to compile a list of all the best submissions. (If you made an awesome entry and want to be considered for the list, leave your link in a comment to my last post.) While scrolling through the contest gallery, every once in a while I’ll come across a commercial that has a recognizable face or two in it. Over the years, a few “celebrities” have appeared in Crash the Super Bowl entries but using known actors seems to be a big trend this year.
But personally, I think using celebrities in a CTSB entry is a really awful idea for everyone involved. Before I get into “why” it’s a bad idea, take a minute and check out this Crash the SuperBowl entry featuring Jenny McCarthy. I can’t embed CTSB videos so you’ll have to click on the image to view it on the contest site:
click to view.
That was seriously a pretty good entry. The production values where top notch, the premise was funny, the women all looked very nice and it ended with a strong punchline. I actually think it would be a major contender if it did NOT feature a celebrity. As it is, there’s just something off-putting about this submission. It causes the viewer to wonder, “Why the hell is Jenny McCarthy in a Crash the Super Bowl entry?” And that question leads to more questions like “Is she broke?” “Does she really need the $25,000 finalist prize that badly? “Or does she just want the attention of being in a Super Bowl ad?” But here’s the most relevant question; if Jenny McCarthy wants to do commercials, why doesn’t she just do some? Is she un-castable or something these days? (NOTE: The answers to all these questions have been answered by one of the directors of this spot! Scroll down for the full story.)
So you see, if you’re a recognizable actor, doing a Crash the Super Bowl entry is is a huge gamble. Like I said, there’s only a 1 in 965 chance of making the finals. But there’s a 100% chance that people will wonder why the heck you would stoop to entering a video contest. Ok…maybe some celebrities enter the contest just for the fun of it. But if a famous person wanted to make a goofy video for fun, they could just do a FunnyorDie sketch for free. So most of them enter for the obvious reason; the prizes for winning are money and exposure. But looking desperate for either of those things is not good for an actor’s image.
And I also think it’s a mistake for filmmakers to feature major or minor celebrities in their Doritos ads. In a way, it goes against the entire point and premise of the Crash the Super Bowl contest. Doritos runs The Crash every year because they want to find something they can’t get from Hollywood or from a big, Madison Avenue ad firm. They want quirky, crazy, outside-of-the-box ideas. In short, they want “User Generated Content.”
The description for Jenny McCarthy’s ad lists two directors. I googled them and it turns out one of them is her ex-husband. And he’s also an known actor. He’s done a lot of TV directing too. So this entry is the exact OPPOSITE of user-generated content. Actually, it’s hollywood’s take on user-generated content. And that is the thing that bothers me most about these “celebrity” entries. They have an air of hubris to them. It’s like an NBA player walking onto a basketball court in a big city, public park thinking he’s going to blow everyone’s minds just because he’s a pro. But no one likes it when a pro chooses to compete against amateurs simply because they’ll be easier to beat. Before I make another weird analogy, check out this other CTSB entry that features boy-banders Lance Bass and AJ Mclean:
Again, click to view.
Now that ad wasn’t so great. The only thing it has going for it is that it has two famous people in it. But right now, the people that produced this ad are probably patting themselves on the back for being smart enough/rich enough/well connected enough to cast Lance Bass and AJ Mclean. They didn’t have to waste time writing a stronger script because two celebrities trump great writing any day…right?
Let’s be honest; the vast majority of Crash the Super Bowl entries are awful. It’s very hard for an “average joe” to make a tight, professional looking 30 second commercial for no money. And that’s why I think celebrities agree to be in CTSB ads. Some friend or nephew or ex-husband finds the contest and thinks, “wow, these commercials all suck! If I spent a few grand and hired a real crew and got my pal,insert-celebrity’s name here to be in my video I would win easy!” But these folks don’t “get” the contest. Presumably they think that their celebrity entry will be much more desirable than the thousands of entries that just feature regular jerk-offs from Nowheresville, USA. If Doritos has to choose between a commercial that features Jenny McCarthy and a commercial that features a bunch of nobodies, Doritos will obviously pick the Jenny McCarthy ad…right?
Wrong. Because if Doritos wanted to air a commercial featuring Jenny McCarthy in a bikini, they would just hire Jenny McCarthy and stick he in a bikini. They wouldn’t bother to run a 10 million dollar “consumer generated” commercial contest if they wanted a typical, “hollywood” ad. So I don’t think we’ll ever see a “celebrity” entry make the CTSB finals. If we did, it would probably mark the end of the entire contest. Because if Doritos tells us that to win, an entry should have a celebrity in it, why would us regular jerk-offs from Nowheresville even bother to compete?
The entries that have recognizable actors in them are pretty interesting though. Some of them are pretty good and some of them are a little lame. Some where clearly made by pros with deep pockets who were able to hire known actors, while other entries seem like maybe they were made by the celebrity’s nephew and the actor is appearing as a favor. Here are the 2011 celebrity ads I’ve been able to find so far. If you see any other ones, leave a link in the comments.
The Eric Roberts Show: Featuring Eric Roberts:
I always liked Eric Roberts. And he's actually pretty funny in this.
Tasty as Charged: Featuring Jerry Adler:
You might not recognize the name but this guy has been in a billion TV shows and movies
Eyes Teeth: Featuring Sam Lloyd:
It's Ted from Scrubs! And he's in a weirdly hilarious CTSB entry!
Party Time: Featuring Blake Clark and Peter Dante:
Wait a second...both of these guys have been in a ton of Adam Sandler movies. I wonder who made this spot.
Despite my bitching, some of those were pretty good. But nothing can top the epicness of this celebrity Pepsi Max entry from Last year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest:
Pretty damn crazy, right? But that spot did not make the finals last year. So If an entry that features a rampaging Ernest Borgnine couldn’t win this contest, I don’t think this year’s crop of celebrity entries stand much chance either.
11/29/2011 UPDATE: The mystery of the Jenny McCarthy ad has been solved! One of the directors actually found this article and he was good enough to explain how the ad came to be. Here’s his full comment:
Hey Beardy
Jenny McCarthy is doing this in the hopes to help http://www.generationrescue.org/. When we got the news from your site ( “The Lonely Island guys are kind of IN the Crash the Super Bowl contest. By that I mean that they will be competing for the 1st place spot on the ad meter and if they get it, they will win the million dollar bonus!” ) We thought we would give it a shot too. Fair is fair..
Thanks for checking out the spot!
John A.
p.s. your site rocks!
Well now, do I feel like an asshole or what?? Not only did Jenny McCarthy and her team shoot an entry as a way to raise money to combat autism, they found out about the details of the Doritos contest from this website! Though to be fair, the lonely Island guys were hired by doritos to shoot a super bowl ad this year. They’re not actually competing against the little guys for a slot in the finals. Their commercial is guaranteed to air. But still, it’s nice to hear that this was for a not for profit endeavor. So, good for them!
Well D (for Doritos) is finally here. Right now it’s 4PM on November 21st which means you only have eight hours left to submit your 2011 Crash the Super Bowl entries. And then tomorrow the wait begins! I get a lot of e-mails this time of year and usually people want to know when Doritos will contact the finalists. The official rules state that Doritos will notify the finalists within 6 weeks. But 6 weeks from today happens to be Monday, January 2nd. During the last installment of The Crash, the finalists were announced on January 3rd. I’ve talked to a number of past finalists and it seems like Doritos usually calls the winners (yes, they’ll actually call you if you make the top 5) just before Christmas. But the contest did start a little later than usual this year so what the heck do I know.
Right now, there are already more than 1,500 submissions posted in CTSB gallery. But when the orange dust settles I bet there will be close to 2,800 entries. That’s a lot less than in year’s past but the lower number is probably because this year, the contest moderators have been doing a great job of keeping people from uploading multiple entries. In past installments, it seemed like every 10th video was a repeat. I guess people uploaded the same videos over and over because they weren’t sure if their submissions went though.
But 2,800 submissions is still a crazy amount. And guess what? This year I have made it my mission to watch every, single CTSB entry! If you watched 2,800 thirty-second commercials in a row, it would take you 23.33 hours to get through them all. But to be honest, I’m not watching every entry from start to finish. In fact, I usually click the “next” button on most entries after about 10 seconds. You see, my goal is to find all the submissions that have a good chance of making it to the Top 5. So if an entry has major technical problems that I suspect will keep it out of the running, I skip it. And after like 15 seconds if I’m not hooked I usually move on to the next video.
This method saves me a lot of time but it isn’t exactly thorough. Sometimes I get in the zone and I skip past videos before I really give them a chance. So readers, I need your help. If you see a really awesome Crash the Super Bowl entry, let me know! And yes, you can send me your own submission if you think it’s especially great. In about two weeks I will post a list of all my favorite 2011 CTSB submissions. How long will the list be? I have no idea! Instead of doing like a “Top 50″ I’m just going to link to every ad that I think is good enough to win….and maybe I’ll throw a few personal favorites in there as well.
So if you have a great entry you want to show me, click the comment button and post the link. Or you can e-mail me at videocontestnews@gmail.com. As always, I’m happy to do a mini-review of every ad you guys send me. I’ll try and be gentle but I’ll also be honest. Just a couple rules; please, don’t ask me to critique an entry that you didn’t help create. Also, I can only do public critiques. So if you want me to give you notes on your submission, post it in the comments section rather than e-mailing it to me. And finally, Full Disclosure: I did shoot a CTSB entry of my own but I will try and be objective and fair….even though my entry is easily the best this year!
Good luck everybody. If you get a call from Doritos saying that you made the finals, be sure to let me know! Yea sure, that would probably get you disqualified but I totally promise to keep your secret…
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
Every once and a while I will come across a “viral” video contest where the winner is determined by youtube views. And when I do see a contest like that, it takes a lot of will power for me NOT to enter. You see, in my time running this website I have learned a lot of shady tricks; and “how to get to get tons of fake youtube views” is one of those tricks. Basically if you go to the right website you can order all the views you want. But those “views” are just fake, junk views. They’re just generated by some guy in India using a computer that is constantly changing its IP address. (or something like that) They don’t come from real people. So in most “viral” contests, buying fake views would be considered cheating. If you buy fake views, there is a good chance you’ll get caught because fake views leave evidence behind. And not only could you get disqualified from the contest you’re in, you could be kicked off of youtube for violating the site’s Terms of Service.
So like I said, I try not to enter “viral” video contests. But about two months ago I came across a contest that was being run by a new micro-jobs website that I just had to enter. The competition was being run in two stages. In the first stage, people were supposed to create funny videos about giraffes (The website’s mascot is a giraffe) and then try to get as many youtube views as they could in four weeks. The people who created the Top 5, most viewed submissions got to go on to round two where they would compete for $15,000. I decided to enter but I promised myself I would NOT buy fake youtube views. (here’s my submission) I figured that with the resources I have at my disposal I could get into the Top 5, fair and square. This website just keeps getting more and more traffic so I stuck a banner ad for my own video at the top of this page. And man, did that get me a lot of views! Plus, I have a kind of popular youtube channel with a few thousand subscribers. So I was able to get a good chunk of views from there too.
But inevitably, as the view count deadline approached, the cheating began. Several other contestants started buying fake views and I was pushed out of the Top 5. I contacted the contest organizers and I explained how you could tell when someone’s view count was phony. But they said they really couldn’t do anything about it because the practice wasn’t actually against the rules. (So technically, it wasn’t even cheating!) So basically I recived the OK from the contest organizers to do whatever I could to get in the Top 5. But I still didn’t want to take the easy way out. So I started looking for a legitimate solution to my problem.
And I found that solution in like five minutes. It turns out that any youtube user can now sign up for the site’s “Promoted Videos” program. Basically you can now buy views from youtube! Except unlike the other views you can buy, these are REAL views that come from REAL people. If you use youtube’s promotions program to get 10,000 views, it means that 10,000 different people actually watched your video. So while some might consider this bending the rules of a viral video contest, no one could claim that you’re breaking the rules since your views are coming from real people and since you’re not violating youtube’s terms of service.
Here’s how the program works: After you sign up, you pick which video you want to promote. Then you tell youtube how much you are willing to pay per view. I think I went with 12 cents but you can go even lower. And remember, that is the most you are willing to pay per view. You then get to select the keywords you want associated with your video. So if your video has a giraffe in it (like mine did) you can select “giraffe” as a keyword. Then when someone searches for giraffe videos on youtube, your video will appear in the “Promoted Videos” sidebar. The more specialized a keyword is, the more you will pay per-click. Here’s a a screengrab of my Promoted Videos Dashboard that shows the keywords I used for my giraffe video:
Note: I cut out the irrelevant parts of this chart in photoshop
So even though I “bid” 12 cents per view, most of my views only cost me 2 or 3 cents. And as you can see, the keyword “funny” was the most popular keyword by a long shot.
After you set your keywords, you tell youtube how much you want to spend every day promoting your videos. If you say “$5,00″ youtube will run your video as an ad all day until you have spent $5.00. I think the best thing about this program is how fast the process is. If you want a huge number of views right away, you can tell youtube you want to spend $200 a day. Youtube will pimp your video like crazy and by end of the day, you’ll have thousands of real views. Here’s what your “dashboard” will look like once your “campaign” is up and running:
Again, this was photo-shopped to save space
The final view count for my giraffe entry was about 16,000. And that was enough to get me into the finals. As you can see, I recived 10,659 views thanks to youtube’s promoted video program. And that means I was able to get 6,000 views on my own. And that’s pretty damn good! If the other contestants hadn’t bought fake views, I would have been able to get in the Top 5 without any help from youtube.
So youtube’s Promoted Videos program is pretty much just a giant, view-creating machine. However many views you want, you can get. And you only get charged when someone actually clicks on your video. But there is one major drawback to this program; this s&%# ain’t cheap. I spent about $300 to get those 10,000 views. So was it a wise purchase? Well, the results of the contest I was will be officially announced on November 1st so check back here on Monday to see how I did. Ok, spoiler alert: I didn’t win the grand prize but I did win some cash. But don’t tell anyone I told you that.
For years I have been lighting my video contest entries with a pair of giant, 1,000 watt halogen lights with enormous “soft boxes” attached to them. But frankly, those lights suck. The bulbs get so hot that the lights have fans inside of them! The fans are so loud that I’m always worried the mic will pick up the whirring sound they make. And anyone who has ever put together a soft box can tell you, they’re a pain to set up and move. Worst of all though, 1,000 watt bulbs aren’t easy to find. The ones I used cost about 16 bucks each and I used to break them all the time. Since you can’t just pick these bulbs up at your local home depot, I had to order them special online. But recently, the company that sold me my light kit stopped carrying the bulbs! They sold me their last two and said they don’t even know where I could find more of them.
So I took that as a sign that it was time to get some decent lights. I did some research and decided to spend a little cash and buy my first LED panel. And let me tell you something…these things are pretty sweet. In fact, I used my new LED light on one shoot and the very next day I ordered a second one. Here’s why these things are so amazing:
1. The panels put out the equivalent of 500 watts of light but only use 50 watts of energy. So you’re probably not going to be tripping any breakers with these.
2. The light is so simple you could set it up in seconds.
3. The LED panel is so small you could stick it in a back pack.
4. The light emits pure white.
5. The LED bulbs stay cool to the touch.
6. There are separate switches on the back for different sections of the panel. So basically, it comes with a “dimmer.”
7. They’re so small you can fit one in a back pack.
8. The look pretty cool.
And yes, “looking cool” is an important feature. When you’re working on a low-budget video project, I think a professional atmosphere is good for the moral of the cast and crew. So I really like these lights. But they do have a few problems:
1. They’re not cheap. These lights cost me $179 each. You can order them here, BTW.
2. The light they emit is incredibly STARK. They have zero warmth to them. You’ll need to carefully white balance and color correct your footage so it doesn’t look like you shot it in a prison.
3. The lights I ordered didn’t come with stands. You’ll need to order them separately. This one works fine.
4. Even on the lowest setting, the lights give off strong shadows. You’ll need to diffuse the light somehow.
To be honest, at first these lights were kind of frustrating Sometimes they would work great and sometimes the looked like crap. It took me a little trial and error but I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of them. I’ll throw one more numbered list at you. Here are some tips for getting better footage out of your LED panels.
1. Buy two of them. Trust me, they work better in pairs.
2. Set them up far from the subject. The farther away the lights are, the better. If you put them to close it will look like you’re shooting a horror movie.
3. Use white umbrellas to diffuse the light. Wax paper or Parchment paper should help too.
4. Crank the lights up as bright as they go and then bounce the light off a ceiling or wall.
5. Use them with natural sunlight!
I’ve found that these LED panels work great when you have some natural sunlight in your scene. If an open window is your main light source, you can use the light to fill in the shadows. Seriously, it works like a charm since the sun and the LEDs are the same “color temperature.” Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Below is my entry for Home Run Inn Pizza’s Halloween video contest. People were supposed to create scary stories that involved HRI Pizza. I lit this whole scene with 2 LED panels and the sun. And I mean every shot in this video was lit with the LED lights; even the wide shot of the exterior of the house:
Click the image to watch...if you dare.
To a causal viewer, the lighting in this video would probably seem totally natural. But trust me, without the LED panels it would have looked like garbage. Take the shot of the ghost for example. You can see that the sunlight is coming from behind him. So without an LED light shining right on him, his front would have been totally dark. But I didn’t need to bathe the guy in artificial light. I only had the LED panel on at about 30%. And check out the shot of the skeleton in the kitchen. Most of the light in that scene was coming from the kitchen window. But the LED was able to fill in the shadows that the sun created.
Ok, sure…I know that there are a lot of lights that could yield similar results. I could have stuck a 300 Watt bulb in a paper “china ball” lantern and the effect would be about the same. But the LED panels are a lot more precise and you can “sculpt” the light since the panels have barn doors on them. Plus, a gigantic China Ball can’t fit in tight spaces like the LED panel can. So if you have a few hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket, I suggest ordering an LED panel and trying it out. After you get the hang of it you’ll want to stick it in a bag and bring it to every shoot you do.
Oh by the way…did you see what I did there when I used my Home Run Inn pizza video as an example? It was my crass attempt to get a few votes for my entry. Voting in that contest runs until the 27th and to vote, all you have to do is log in to facebook and click the vote button. So please do vote if you have 15 seconds to spare. If I get in the top 15, I’ll win free pizza for a year! Also, be sure to watch the video. Views don’t matter, I just think it’s pretty funny.
