Last August I did a post about the amazing video that won Tongal’s “Stuck on Duct Tape” contest.  It was entitled “Duct Tron” and it featured some incredible stop motion animation and ridiculously brilliant surprise ending.  Well the director who made that ad, David Brashear just won another Tongal contest and once again is work is extremely worthy of a blog post.  Here’s his first place entry in Tongal’s BodyArmor contest.

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