Man, I really liked that one.  It was very well made and felt so genuine despite the absurd subject matter.  Actually, almost all of the 16 winners are pretty well done.  Some people really went all out and did incredibly elaborate submissions.  You can see all the winning videos right here.  But be warned: watching all 16 of these videos will probably make you want to eat some pringles as soon as possible.  Damn I wish I had  tube of Sour cream and onion right now.
 

About a year ago, the CEO of Poptent was visiting Chicago and the company set up a dinner where he could meet some site members.  I got to go and the CEO was a super nice guy.  He went around and asked everybody what they thought about Poptent and he listened to everyone’s suggestions and ideas. My suggestion was that Poptent should team up with a website that licenses music for commercial use.  I had been licensing music for my Poptent submissions from a site named PremiumBeat.com and having professional music really made my entries seem a lot slicker.  I said maybe PremiumBeat would want to licensee tracks for free or at a discount if Poptent officially partnered up with them.  The CEO seemed pretty interested in the idea and I think we even exchanged e-mails about it later.

But I guess I was just ahead of my time!  Poptent never teamed up with a music site but yesterday I got a press release announcing a new partnership between Mofilm and the music licensing site AudioSocket.  The details of the arrangement are extraordinary; Filmmakers can now license music for use in their Mofilm entries for free.  When I first read about this I figured there might be 50 or 100 special tracks that AudioSocket set aside for Mofilm members.  But naw….there are more than 33,000 songs available in AudioSocket’s Mofilm Music Storefront.  All you have to do is pick your track and add it to your cart.  But don’t let words like “storefront” and “checkout” fool you.  When you go to check out, you don’t actually have to pay.  To peruse AudioSocket’s Mofilm catalog, head here.

And guess what else I just learned….the video contest site Tongal ALSO has partnered up with AudioSocket!  So filmmakers can also license music for free for their Tongal entries.  Here’s some more info about that:

Tongal has partnered with Audiosocket, a boutique music licensing agency representing more than 1,400 emerging bands, composers and record labels. Audiosocket tracks will be available to Tongal members at no charge solely for their incorporation into Tongal members’ submissions to the Nespresso project. Tongal members are encouraged to browse the Audiosocket catalog, available at http://audiosocket.com. If you are interested in using a track from the Audiosocket catalog, as described above, please email music@tongal.com for account and password info, which will allow for the download of up to three tracks.

I think these partnerships are a HUGE deal.  Every contest site should be doing something like this.  When you shoot a video on spec or for a contest you feel the sting of every dollar you spend because there’s a very good chance that you’re not going to make that money back.  Every time I license a track from PremiumBeat it costs me $30.  And that 30 bucks can be a factor in whether or not I actually shoot an entry for a video contest/assignment.  I usually try and keep my budgets around $150 so if licensing music is going to push a project over that number, I might just scrap the idea.  If filmmakers can gamble less money on their contest entries, they’ll probably wind up shooting more of them.  So in the long run, a partnership with a licensing company is going to pay off for site like Mofilm and Tongal in the long run.
 

BodyArmor’s First Place winner.  Prize:  $7,500:

Pretty damn good, huh??  The thing that I love about that video is that it’s almost certainly based on a 20 year old urban legend.  Back when I was in grade school, I can remember kids talking about the hover boards that appeared in Back to the Future II.  The rumor was that the hoverboards in the movie were real but they were illegal in America because they were too dangerous.  Just a few years ago I learned that this hoverboard myth came directly from the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis.  According to Michael J. Fox, Zemeckis got tired of explaining how the hoverboard special effects were done in BTTFII so he just started saying that Hoverboards were real.  He went so far as to declare in some Back to the Future TV special the hoverboards were a real thing but toy companies couldn’t sell them because parents groups wouldn’t let them.  You can read a whole lot more about this weird story here.  That page includes a video that Zemeckis produced as “proof” that hoverboards existed.  Watch it closely and you’ll see that the director of the Body Armor video probably drew a little inspiration from it.

A dozen (!) other videos won prizes in this contest ranging from $3,000 to $500.  A lot of them are also pretty good so you might want to check them out.  Actually, you might want to just head over to Tongal so you can take a look at some of the contests they’re currently running.  I’m really impressed with how that site has grown in the last year.  They keep announcing one huge contest after another and the prize amounts keep going up and up.  I just checked and it looks like almost all of their current contests offer top prizes of at least $10,000.  So…that’s pretty nice.  http://tongal.com/projects
 

Everyone loves a follower!

If you’re reading this post, chances are that you’re either a filmmaker or a Russian spammer who is going to try and leave a comment about where people can get a Microsoft Zune for cheap.  Either way, you probably have a twitter account that you use for online networking.  It took me a long time to get into Twitter but I now hate it a lot less than I used to.  Turns out twitter can actually be a helpful tool if you’re into video contests.  For example, I’ve learned that if you want to get a response from a contest sponsor, sometimes you should try sending them an @ message on twitter.  Most companies monitor their accounts closely and apparently they actively try to make it look like they’re friendly, responsive and easy to deal with.  Last summer I spent months and months trying to get one company to pay me a big contest prize they owed me.  I sent tons of e-mails and my contact just kept giving me the run around.  But then I sent a tweet asking why I hadn’t been paid my prize yet and BAM….the response was immediate.  My contact was unhappy that I made my “problem” public but it finally forced them to take care of the issue.

But of course, you can use Twitter for nice things too.  I follow a bunch of video contest companies on twitter and you know what?  You should too.  They tweet out a lot of good info.  Case in point: I’m shooting an entry for Mofilm’s Walmart competition this weekend and just yesterday Mofilm tweeted that new video assets had been added to the project.  I’ll use one of those clips for sure in my commercial and I wouldn’t have even know they were available if it wasn’t for twitter.

So for the first time ever, I thought I’d take part in the weekly twitter tradition known as #FollowFriday.  It’s where users tweet out suggestions of who to follow.  So here are my #FollowFriday suggestions:

ONLINEVIDEOCONTESTS.COM:  https://twitter.com/#!/videocontests

FILMTHENEXT.COM:  https://twitter.com/#!/FilmTheNext

MOFILM:  http://twitter.com/#!/MOFILMugc

POPTENT:  https://twitter.com/#!/poptent

TONGAL:  https://twitter.com/#!/tongal

ZOOPPA:  https://twitter.com/#!/ZooppaUSA

And of course, if you don’t already follow VCN on Twitter, you should add us too.  And because I’m feeling saucy today I’ll even follow back any new followers VCN gets this weekend.  Yarg…sentences like that are one of the reasons twitter still annoys me a little.

VCN:  https://twitter.com/#!/Beardy_VCN
 

The phrase "Most Notable" wouldn't fit on the banner so I went with "Best"

Back in December I was planning on doing an article about the “Best Video Contest Entries of 2011.”  I did one in both 2010 and 2009 but I never got around to doing the 2011 list.  The thing is, 2011 wasn’t really a kick ass year for “consumer generated content.” There just weren’t many big stand outs.  So I figured that before we get any deeper into 2012 I’d just do a quick run down of the best video contest entries of the past year.  But here’s the thing; these entries aren’t really “the best.”  Anyone who has entered even a single video contest knows that the “best” entries don’t always win.  So let’s say that these are the most notable contest entries of 2011.  Basically this will be a list of the biggest winners of the past year.

In February, the Crash the Super Bowl finalist Pug Attack aired during the Super Bowl and scored the Million Dollar ad meter bonus.  But you know, I never really liked Pug Attack since it was just kind of a re-do of the CTSB winning ad, Underdog. One CTSB spot I did like though was the Pepsi Max commercial, Love Hurts.  That ad also aired during the game and won a $400,000 ad meter bonus.

The spring of 2011 was a very good time for a Lexington, KY man named Walt Arnett.  In March his “Cash America rap” won first place and $10,000 on Cash America’s Cash Rap video contest.  In May this video won him 1 of the 6 Mini Coopers that Dairy Queen gave away in their Mini Blizzard Treatment video contest.  And then just a week or so later his entry won the $150,000 grand prize in Excedrin’s What’s Your Headache video contest.  Interesting note: All three of these contests used facebook votes to determine the winners.

During the summer, Gain detergent awarded a million dollars to this video in their Smell Like a Million Bucks video contest.  The winner of that contest was determined by a public vote so of course the winning entry wasn’t that great.

And….that’s it.  Those were all the big contests on 2011.  It used to be that there were several big video contests a year where the grand prize would be at least $25,000.  And as far as I can remember, there weren’t any “make our TV commercial” contests last year either.  I guess that sites like Poptent, Tongal and Mofilm have made those kind of big contests unnecessary. But a few contest entries did make it onto TV in 2011.  In November, Triaminc started airing a Poptent-made ad entitled 102.  And this cool Mofilm-made ad, “Chevy Runs Deep” actually aired during the MLB AllStar game.

Now that I mention it, Mofilm ran a ton of huge video contests in 2011.  Each contest was based around a different film festival or arts event and each competition had an over all winner.  You can see all of the top Mofilm winners of 2011 in this convenient youtube playlist:  http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL42175AE837CCDF68

Finally, I think I’ll close out this list by naming VCN’s pick for The Best Video Contest Entry of 2011.  This was an easy call.  Top honors go to “Duct Tron” which won first place and $4,750 (?) in Tongal’s Stuck on Duct Tape competition.  Not only is it an amazing on a technical level, it actually has a hilarious surprise ending.  This ad wound up going viral and recived a crazy amount of love from the Internet.  Watch it and you will understand why.
 

 
If I missed any big 2011 contest entries leave a comment and let me know!

First Place Winner.  Prize:  $10,000:

Pretty good huh?  Looks really professional too.  I was keeping an eye on this contest because I actually entered this one myself.  I collaborated with my long-distance contest buddy HappyJoel Levinson; he created a song and I shot and edited a video for it.  We did manage to win a prize; $500.  But this was one of those times when I kind of knew I had missed the mark.  I think the video was cute but it was lacking pizazz.  You can’t tell from the video but the outside stuff was shot in the freezing rain.  But at least the shoot was a good excuse to try out my new camera gear.  I just bought an HVX200 last month and I’m really happy with it.  Now that I’m using a real video camera again I realize just how inhibiting DSLRs can be.  With the HVX I don’t need to worry about ISO numbers or syncing up audio in post or stuff going out of focus if I move the camera a foot closer to the subject.  I’m excited to shoot a lot more entries this year now that I don’t have to worry so much about the tech side of things.  Basically I’ll be able to just point and shoot.  Anywho, if you’d like to see the entry Joel and I did (or the rest of the winning spots) head here:  http://tongal.com/project/aceservice