MAY 5, 2010 UPDATE:  This morning, Taxslayer sent out e-mails to everyone who submitted videos for this year’s competition and announced that the contest was being CANCELED due to lack of submissions.  As you will see below, I found 18 video submissions for this year’s contest and some of them are very good.  I have been following and entering online video contests since 2007 and I have NEVER seen this kind of thing happen before.  It’s a total shock and major disappointment that one of the most established and best known contests would do this to all the people who spent precious time, money and resources making videos for them.

I can tell from my web-logs that a number of people have found this post after searching for reasons behind today’s the cancellation.  We will be doing a thorough post about this later this week but for now, if you entered the 2010 Taxslayer video contest please let us know at .

2nd Update: We just put up a new post about the cancellation of the taxslayer contest.  You can find it here:  https://videocontestnews.com/2010/05/05/taxslayer-com-cancels-video-contest-20-days-after-the-submission-deadline/

Well yesterday was April 15^th: Tax Day.  If you won a lot of money in video contests last year, right about now you’re probably wishing you had saved some of that money to pay your tax bill.  But April 15^th was also the deadline for the third annual Taxslayer.com video contest.  For weeks I had been wrestling with several ideas for this one but I just couldn’t get them to work.  So eventually I  decided to just skip the contest this year.  But about 9 days ago, a fresh idea hit me and I figured I should to go for it.  I was even motivated to finally buy the HD camera I had been considering.

I photoshopped my props on Wednesday and I bought my camera on Thursday.  I spent a few hours trying to figure the thing out and then we filmed on Friday.  By Monday I had both my 30 second and 15 second versions (remember, you had to submit 2 versions for this one) edited and done.

So after all that work, I was totally burnt out by Monday.  Then…another idea hit me.  I figured I had spent so much money on my new camera that I should try and get some use out of it so I wrote, produced, shot and edited a second entry in record time…well, record time for me, anyway.

One of the rules of the taxslayer contest is that contestants must upload their entries to youtube and tag them “taxslayer2010.”  As far as I can tell, 18 pairs of videos were submitted.  And there are some pretty good ones in there.  Since taxslayer doesn’t post all the entries, I thought I’d embed the 30 second versions of all of them below.  These are in order by upload date from last to first.  Can you spot which two entries are mine?  I’ll reveal them at the bottom of the post.

So the two entries I did are “It’s Tax Time!” (The one with the people playing the board game) and “Use Taxslayerrrrr.com” (the one with the pirates and their booty.)  I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.  I did forget one of the five required “Taxslayer.com” mentions in my pirate ad and had to use some creative editing to squeeze one more in though.

If I see any more entries, I will update this post.  But I think these are all of them.  If you have any thoughts about who will win first ($15,000) and second ($5,000) this year, post them in the comments.