My favorite kind of video contests are those that have an unusual hook, rather than the standard “Make your own (blank) commercial” type thing. So here’s a new competition that caught my eye; The King Kong 360 – 3D contest. It’s being held over on the contest site Zooppa.com and its got an interesting premise. The contest is being held to promote Peter Jackson’s new King Kong 360 ride at Universal studios. But you’re not just supposed to make a commercial for the ride. Filmmakers are instructed to make a short film that shows what would happen if King Kong rampaged through their town while on his way down to Universal Studios.
But don’t worry, you don’t need to be a special effects genius to enter. You don’t actually have to show Kong in action. Instead, you can focus on the aftermath. Check out this promo video to get a feel of what they’re looking for.
Now, I’ll be entering this contest and if you enter because of this blog post and wind up beating me, please let me know so I can crush you with my giant monkey foot. $15,000 in prizes are up for grabs and the deadline is June 7th, so you’ve still got lots of time to get down to (monkey) business. Ha!
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yeah, this is interesting, I have been working on an idea for this one too, should be fun!
I’ve got a question – do you enter these poptent and zoopa contests? I never have and I don’t really like the sites. Do you like how they’re run? Do you prefer them over self-run contests, or less? I’d like to see a post on this comparing the different venues, particularly since I’m sure they charge a hefty amount to a company to run a contest, and I wonder if you think it’s worth it?
Joel,
I like self-run contests best but poptent is a very good site. I submitted to three poptent assignments in 2009 and won prizes in two of them for a total of $8,500. They never do voting of any kind and sometimes the sponsors suprise everyone and “buy” extra videos.
The competition on poptent though has gotten really stiff and the production values on some of the videos are really high. Tough assignments for more obscure products might only get 50 submissions but easy products (becks beer, fed-ex) can get well over 100. I’d say try out the site but maybe wait for an assignment that really, really spoke to you.
Zoopa seems interesting so I’m going to try it out with this king kong contest.
There’s a site called tongal that I recommend you avoid. The prizes are small and split between lots of people. Actually, they still owe me 50 bucks!
Thanks for that great recommendation Beardy. And Joel, if you ever want a tour of Poptent, I’d be happy to show you around.
Joel – You may find this post by Jared Cicon aka “The Video Contest King” helpful.
http://videocontestking.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/zooppa-a-good-model/
Let me know if you have any questions about the King Kong contest – – be great to see your work.