UPDATE: We blew it! Looks like Beardy got taken by some bad “insider” info. Two of our three “finalist” scoops turned out to be wrong! We are really sorry about that folks. We have removed the incorrect info from this site.
We were correct about one finalist though. “The Casket” was the only of the 6 finalist videos to leak before the official announcement at 12AM Central time today. So the portions of this post that pertain to “The Casket” will remain up.
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Tonight at 11PM Eastern time, voting begins in the 2010 installment of Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl video contest. From the looks of the CTSB website, the 6 finalists won’t be revealed until voting begins. So you’ll have to wait until then to see which entries made the cut. Or you could just continue reading and see three of those six videos right now.
Like I said, the Crash the Superbowl finalists won’t officially be announced until later tonight. But I can say with 95% certainty that these three ads have made the top six. WARNING: Two of these three videos are on this list because they are educated guesses based on very, very strong information. If you actually made any of these videos and you have not heard from Doritos, that means you didn’t make the finals! In that unlikely scenario, I apologize for getting your hopes up. Again, these 3 are 95% for sure.
INCORRECT VIDEO #1 REMOVED
INCORRECT VIDEO #2 REMOVED
“The Casket” by ms. Video #3006
“The Casket” is the only entry I am certain made the final cut because it was mentioned in an article about superbowl commercial 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 plagiarized my own work. Here is MY casket-full-of-doritos entry, video #1983, “Rest in Chips.”
This is my video and NOT a finalist:
Both videos feature a dead man’s last wish to be buried in a casket full of Doritos, a funeral for that guy that turns out to be fake, a big, framed photo of the “dead” guy enjoying a bag of Doritos next to the casket, shots of that guy in his casket buried up to his face in chips and a climax in which the “dead” guy gets his comeuppance when the casket of chips is knocked over. So many of the same key elements appear in both spots that it’s hard to chalk the whole thing up to coincidence.
A month before I shot “Rest in Chips,” I created a (crude) animated storyboard so that I could plan out the timing of the shoot. I uploaded the storyboard to youtube the first week of October so that my actors and crew could get a better idea of what I had in mind. I named it something like “Doritos storyboard.” That means any potential Doritos contestants could have seen it while searching youtube to see last year’s winners. In fact, it would have been one of the top results since it was a recent upload. After maybe a week I realized this and pulled the video. Then I re-uploaded it with a generic name so it would not appear in Doritos-related searches. Here it is. If you watch it on youtube you’ll see that its upload date is October 12th. Play my youtube storyboard and “The Casket” at the same time and they almost seem to line up shot for shot. And for the record, I did some googling and “The Casket” was shot on November 1st. By November 1st I already had rough cuts of my entry posted to my youtube page.
I really never expected to make it to the finals and I’m not upset because I didn’t win. But I am upset that someone who may have plagiarized my work is going to be rewarded for their actions. Because “The Casket” was so slickly produced, I knew it would be a contender for the final six. So several weeks ago I e-mailed Doritos, sent them my links and told them about my suspicions. They told me they would send the information to their legal team. But I never heard from anyone from Doritos again.
Originally, I posted (at length) about my plagiarism worries on November 19th. Since then, my suspicions have only increased. The usatoday.com article mentions the name of the producer of “The Casket” and explains that he works at the church that appears in that video. They even mention the church by name. Based on this new info, I dug through my site logs and it seems very, very likely that the producer of “The Casket” found my post about his entry last week and read it over and over.
So think about that for a second. Imagine you just found out that you made the final 6 in the CTSB contest. Then imagine that you google “Doritos casket” (according to my weblogs, that’s how the person found my post) and see that the number one search result for that phrase was a blog post by another filmmaker suggesting that your entry might have been a rip-off of his idea. What would you do? I know what I’d do. If I didn’t steal the idea, I’d immediately e-mail the blogger or leave a comment and explain my side of the story. But no message ever came.
And now that I know that the producer of “The Casket” works at the church featured in their entry, I think I have a pretty good idea what happened. The producer or the director of the entry went to youtube after the Crash the Superbowl contest was announced and searched for “doritos” so they could see what the 2009 finalist videos looked like. “The Casket” was shot with a very expensive camera called a “RED Camera.” Any filmmaker who watches last year’s finalists would recognize that all but one of them were shot with RED cameras. So the producers of “The Casket” clearly did their homework. And I suspect that while they were doing their homework, they saw . The idea in the storyboard seems kind of outrageous and un-film-able….unless you happen to have free and total access to an amazingly beautiful church. My theory is that they saw my storyboard and figured no one would be crazy enough to get a casket and dig a giant hole in the ground. I think they assumed the idea would never be shot so they took it and adapted the idea to fit the location they had at their disposal.
For the record, I have no concrete proof of any unethical behavior and if my theories are proven to be incorrect I will wipe all mention of them from this site and apologize to everyone involved. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong I think. I have a reputation of my own to think about and I’d never share these ideas in public if my gut didn’t tell me I was on to something.
I really have no idea what I’m going to do about all this but to quote The Dude; “This aggression will not stand, man.” If anybody has any suggestions about how I should proceed I’d love to hear ‘em.
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“Rose Colored Doritos” is not that great of a spot! Its just ok at best.
why do you think its one of the 6?
Wholly crap!! I just read the usa today article on-line! Wow when i read your article last month about them ripping you off I was like, Oh well, that ad wont make the top 6 anyway so it doesn’t matter. But now! its a different story! That sucks!!!!
I would ask those guys to split the money with you.
I don’t know how you would go about it, but obviously something must be done RE: the casket “coincidence.” I feel really bad for you. I’m annoyed and I don’t even know you. Don’t stand idly by. Do something, and keep us all posted. Good luck.
I think you’re evidence is pretty solid. I think you have a legitimate case here. But just be careful. If you’re going to sue people, try not to ruin the crash the superbowl contest for the rest of us by making them not want to do it next year!!
have you consider contacting the people who made the other commercial?
it seems like you are wasting your energy on speculation when you could just go to the source and get over this situation.
I think we need to wait until the 6 finalists are announced for sure later tonight. It wouldn’t be the first time misinformation was leaked. It is highly suspicious that this ‘pastor’ would be granting interviews before the announcement date/time, considering Doritos swears these guys to secrecy (I know first hand how serious Doritos is about this). Let’s see what happens tonight and then go from there.
Jared aka the VCK
1. Where the heck are the finalists? The countdown on the website is at zero but they’re not up yet.
2. To comment of what ellen said, the last thing you want to do is contact the people who made the commercial. Obviously they will deny it if you contact them! Anyone would. So you gain nothing by contacting them and asking them. In fact, you might loose legal ground. Don’t try and deal with this yourself. This is a serious legal matter. A million dollars are at stake. You already did one very smart thing. You contacted doritos before the finalists were announced and warned them. Now, they are culpable if their was intellectual property theft. Your next step is to get a lawyer. You can’t get the truth on your own but a lawyer can help you.
3. Great site by the way.
Damn, Beardy. I’m one of the guys from Rose-Colored Doritos…talk about getting one’s hopes up. You broke my heart.
andrew, are you serious!? Oh man, I am sorry. If you e-mail me at I will explain why I thought you guys made it. I thought it was strong info.
Ironically, one of the finalists did e-mail me today and offered to tell me the whole list. I thought it was a joke but there they are in the top 6! I need to pick better sources.
zach,
The finalists are now posted at crashthesuperbowl.com. The rules stated that voting would actually start at midnight central time. So their clock was off.
Thanks for the legal advice. I think you’re probably right. A few months ago I got an angry, profane message from an “anonymous” filmmaker who didn’t like what I had to say. He went so far as to pretend to be another, disgruntled filmmaker. I had his IP address and location in my weblogs and it was clear who made the post. So I blogged about it and called him out. The guy wrote me as cool as could be and denied everything. He said he thought it was pretty funny but he was not the guy who made fun of the penis size of our cartoon mascot “Beardy.” He flat out lied when accused.
I set him the web tracking info and there was no denying he was the annonymous commenter. He begged for forgiveness and apolgized for being a liar. But it was obvious that he wasn’t sorry. He was just worried about my posts about him showing up in google results for his name. He sank so low that he used God and Christ to try and guilt me into forgiving him. (I removed his name from my posts) Oh! Ironically, the reason he sent me his nasty e-mail was because I called him out on an act of plagiarism! So if someone is going to steal an idea, they certainly deny it until the bitter end.
Here is a quote from the official rules.
“BY ENTERING THIS CONTEST AND UPLOADING YOUR SUBMISSION, YOU IRREVOCABLY GRANT TO SPONSOR AND ITS AGENTS THE UNCONDITIONAL AND PERPETUAL RIGHT TO POST, DISPLAY, PUBLISH, USE, ADAPT, EDIT AND/OR MODIFY SUCH SUBMISSION IN ANY WAY, IN ANY AND ALL MEDIA, FOR ANY PURPOSE, WITHOUT LIMITATION, AND WITHOUT CONSIDERATION TO YOU.”
sucks doesn’t it!
David,
Doritos can say whatever they want, that doesn’t make it so. They could say that by entering the contest you have to give them your first born child, but that would never hold up. The terms you just quoted would also never hold up. Doritos has no proof that the person who clicked “ok” to their terms and conditions was the person who owned the copyright to the submission. And only a copyright holder can authorize that type of use. That’s why copyrights can only be transferred with signed agreements. Doritos would also need to get releases from everyone who appears in the spot before they could air it.