2012 May | Video Contest News - Featuring News about Video Contests!

How to create a decent “Pro-Am” demo reel

Posted by Dan L. on May 31st, 2012

I’ve heard the term “Pro-Am” all my life but it just seemed like a sports thing (Pro Am golf, Pro Am racing teams) so I never gave it much thought. But as I learned a few weeks ago, “Pro Am” stands for “Professional Amateur” and the term is now being applied to creative types that are “pursuing amateur activities to professional standards.” I’ve never liked calling myself a “semi-pro filmmaker” because I don’t think of myself as a “pro” at all. I sometimes shoot things like concerts, shows and music videos but no one ever hires me to shoot commercial projects. I just go shoot contest entries or spec ads on my own and sometimes I make a sale or win a prize. So “professional amateur” seems like a perfect way to describe video contest filmmakers; we are basically speculative freelancers who make money by creating hyper-low-budget videos that look and feel professional.

Whether you’re a pro, a semi-pro or a pro-am filmmaker, you really need to have a demo reel online so potential clients can get a quick feel for the kind of work you do. Making a snazzy demo reel isn’t too tough if you’re a highly-skilled editor or animator or if you’ve worked with professional directors, actors, cinematographers before. Here, check out this excellent reel that won the $500 first prize in Poptent’s “Demo Reel of the month” contest back in January:

That was pretty damn impressive. If I were looking for a filmmaker I’d certainly want to hire that guy. But not all of us can have a reel like that. Very few members of Poptent have worked on professional projects or with people like Run DMC and Jerry Springer. So how do you put together a reel if you’re a one-person, low budget, pro-am production company? I personally only spend about $50 to $250 on each of my video contest entries. So they don’t feature gorgeous cinematography, impressive stunts, eye-popping special effects or recognizable actors. My videos are just simple, funny and kind of weird. Fortunately, there are tons of companies that want low budget, simple, funny, weird videos for their online ad campaigns.

Reading about this “Pro-Am” stuff inspired me to finally cut together a demo reel of my own. I realized it wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t fill my reel with fancy graphics or big budget production values since I wasn’t trying to get hired for big budget gigs. At best I’m just hoping that my reel will get me invited to a few private Poptent assignments. If that’s your goal too, you should focus getting two points across with your reel:

1. You are technically competent: Your reel needs to show off the simple fact that you know how to handle a camera, light a scene and edit together your footage. I know that sounds pretty obvious but go check out some of the videos that are submitted to a typical Poptent assignment. You’ll be surprised by the number of new and novice producers who are still trying to master the basics.

2. Show off your personal style: I feel like strong writing and weird/quirky plots and characters are what make my videos feel unique. But demo reels aren’t really a great way to show off your writing. Demo Reels should be short and snappy. So instead of stringing together a series of my best videos, I decided to focus on my “visual style.” I took clips of all the weirdest or coolest looking stuff I’ve shot in the last 2 years and smooshed them all together. My goal was simple: I wanted people to look at the reel and think to themselves, “well, that guy certainly has a FUN style….I wonder what kind of FUN video he could shoot for us.”

I didn’t think my demo reel would be all that great but I’m actually pretty happy with the way it turned out. Its a little cheesy at times but hey, so is most of my work. Here it is: UPDATE: I went back and cut about 45 seconds from the reel so I’ll post the updated version. Common sense told me that the first version needed to be much shorter but I had to let that idea sink in for a few days before I actually did anything about it. So here’s a bonus tip: Shorter is always better….at least when it comes to demo reels.

Man, I have really filmed some weird stuff over the years. Looking back, I’m kind of surprised how professional some of those videos look. Anyway, right about you’re probably thinking that you could create a better demo reel so maybe it’s time you give it a shot. Here are a few more random tips for creating a reel of your low budget work:

1. Pick a cool, indie song: In a recent blog post, the Poptent staff gave some basic tips for creating better demo reels. One of their suggestions was “Edit to great music.” But you can’t just pick any great song. Your reel is your chance to show off how cool and indie and artistic you are. If you use a cliche piece of music or a well known track from a famous band, you’re going to come off as kind of lame. Instead, you’re going to want to try and find an awesome song that will be totally new to most people. Is this a little ridiculous? Sure. But watch 100 great demo reels and you’ll see that most of them feature amazing but unknown tracks. I suggest you just pick one of your favorite songs by one of your favorite non-famous band. That’s what I did.

2. Cut to the music: This one is obvious but it’s important. Try and get the emotion of the clips to match the emotion of the song and make cuts when there is some kind of punctuation in the music. Just watch a bunch of music videos before you start editing and you’ll figure it out.

3. Include some mini-stories: Don’t just mix a bunch of random shots together. If you’re proud of the stories you tell, try and edit down your videos to include condensed version of your videos. You can get a lot of plot across in 5 seconds of visuals.

4. Mix up your footage: If you want to use multiple clips from the same video, spread them around. 10 continuous seconds from one project might get boring.

5. Add a clickable link: If you upload your demo reel to Poptent, you can add a clickable link to your website in the “details” box. Just click on “settings” and add this line of code to the details box:

<a href=”your-website’s-link“>your-website’s-name</a>

6. Stick with your recent stuff: I know you probably shot some great SD videos back in the day (AKA 3 years ago) but you really shouldn’t put any clips in your reel if they aren’t HD. Viewers are now so accustomed to HD that a boxy, SD video really seems out dated. You don’t want to give a prospective client any reason to worry that you might shoot their project with a non-HD camera. However, if you have a clip that is really, really amazing you can probably get away with cropping it so it fits the HD screen size.

“Welcome to Prizes.org” winner

Posted by Dan L. on May 23rd, 2012

VCN super-fans may remember that a few months ago the site was covered in ads promoting Prizes.org’s “Welcome to Prizes.org” video contest. The company was looking for an official “explainer video” that would you know….explain how the site worked. They got a bunch of nice entries but here’s the very impressive submission that won the top prize. If you head to the Prizes.org homepage you’ll notice that the winning video is the first thing you see when you visit the site.

Prizes.org winner. Prize: $10,000:

I was at a party about a week ago and there happened to be a whole bunch of filmmakers and editors there. I asked everyone what kind of projects they worked on recently and I can’t tell you how many times the phrase “explainer video” came up. Every website that offers some new kind of service needs an explainer video and most of the ones I’ve seen are very similar in style to the above animation. Hmm, maybe I should find an animation class I can take this summer…..

FireFox Flicks’ Winners

Posted by Dan L. on May 21st, 2012

Man, you really should have entered the FireFox Flicks video contest. Actually, I guess I should have too. They were offering a butt-load of cash prizes but for some reason they didn’t get many decent entries. I think maybe the premise behind this contest was a little too abstract. Contestants were supposed to create short films that “told the firefox story.” I love Firefox and I’ve been using it for as long as I can remember but even I couldn’t figure out how to make a short film a bout a web browser.

You can see all of the FireFox Flicks winners here. There actually were a few stand-out entries. For example, here’s the perfect little video that won the US “30 Second Spot” category and went on to win the $10,000 USA Grand Prize:

click to view

Another weird thing about this contest; it was open to people all over the world and prizes were set aside for winners in each region (USA, Europe, Asia/Africa/Australia, and Latin America.) Video contests just aren’t very popular outside of the US. Consequently, some not-so-hot films won $5,000 prizes simply because there were almost no other entries in their particular category. I’ve actually seen this type of thing happen in a few “international” video contests before….you know, maybe I should pull an Eduardo Saverin, renounce my US citizenship and start shooting my contest entries in Asia. Ha! I’m a genius! See you in Beijing, suckers!

How to shoot decent video with an iPhone

Posted by Dan L. on May 15th, 2012

The people who set up video contests always want to get as many entries as possible. Even if most of the entries aren’t very good, a ton of submissions just makes the contest look more successful. So sponsors usually go out of their way to encourage people of all skill levels to submit videos. And that’s why you’ll see a lot of contest announcements that include lines like this:

“You don’t need a big fancy camera to shoot an entry. Just grab your flip cam or iphone and have fun!”

What the sponsors fail to mention is that if “production quality” is part of the judging criteria, the little video you shot with your cell phone probably won’t stand much chance against the slick entries that were shot with DSLRs or HD video cameras. But as I learned from the video I’m about to post, you actually can get pretty decent footage out of an iphone if you follow a few simple steps. This tutorial was shot for the youtube channel which is filled with lots of helpful how-to videos. If you have an iPhone, this video is definitely worth checking out. But take note: It does start with a lot of yelling and some cheesy but realistic gun play. So you probably shouldn’t watch this one while at work or while babysitting.

When is the best time to post vote requests on facebook?

Posted by Dan L. on May 13th, 2012

Last Friday I shot, edited and submitted a video to Ecos’ “Get Washed” video contest and despite the quick production, I think it’s one of the best video contest entries ever done. It’s simple but quirky and it features one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with. It’s also probably the greatest color correction job I’ve done, period. (One of the tough things about filming in the woods is that the light is uneven and everything has a yellowish-green hue.) The shooting and editing might have only taken a few hours but I had to put a surprising amount of pre-production work into this project. Just picking up and dropping off the giant squirrel suit took about 5 hours! Because the whole commercial is basically just a monologue, I knew casting would be crucial. After days of searching I finally found a fantastic actress and she just knocked it out of the park.

The top prizes in this contest are $10K and $5K and I think I might actually have a decent shot. There is a public voting phase to determine the Top 25 videos though. After the voting is done, judges alone will chose the top winners. I didn’t think I’d really need to hustle for votes for this contest but Ecos wound up getting almost 90 entries! So if you’ve got 5 seconds to spare, I’d appreciate it if you could click on this image and vote for my submission. And if you’ve got 35 seconds to spare, you can even watch it if you’d like.

Click to view and/or vote!

Today is the first day of voting which happens to be a sunday. And that’s kind of unusual because most contests start and finish their voting phases on week days. When the voting went live this morning I posted a request for votes on my personal facebook page. But then I stopped and thought about the timing of my request; how many people would actually see it? How many people are even on facebook at 10AM on a Sunday? I don’t like to bombard my facebook friends with a ton of video contest vote requests so I only ask for votes a few times each contest. (If all your facebook posts are about contests, you’re friends are just going to get annoyed and block or limit your posts. So a ton of requests can really backfire on you. Plus like I said, it’s just annoying and not cool)

So if I’m only going to ask for votes 2 or 3 times, I want to make sure I post those requests at the right time. But what is “the right time”? Basically what I want to know is, when is facebook busiest? Unfortunately, Facebook isn’t saying. And that’s not surprising because if they actually came out announced the best time of day to post something, every company would start posting stuff at that time. But it seems that this question does have an answer. A social Network Management company named Virtue conducted a study of facebook activity about a year and a half ago. You can read a breakdown of the study here but it looks like the best time to post a vote request (or anything, really) on facebook probably is…

2:55PM on a Wednesday.

According to the study, facebook is constantly getting a ton of traffic. But there is always a spike in activity around 3pm on weekdays. You should try and post just before 3:00 because a lot of people sign in right at the top of the hour. (Maybe that’s when the TV show they were watching ended or maybe that’s when their afternoon break begins.) This spike happens every day but Wednesdays are usually facebook’s busiest day of the week.

According to the study, posts that are done in the morning actually get seen/liked/shared more than afternoon posts. But a vote request isn’t a typical facebook post. In the morning people are signing into facebook right at the start of the day. 9:00AM is not goof-off time…it’s a time to sign in really quick to check messages and skim the news feed. By late afternoon, people are signing into facebook because they’re bored. So you want to get your vote requests in front of people who have some time to kill.

Keep in mind that if you live LA but all your family and friends live back in Chicago, you should probably post your requests at 3:00PM Chicago time. Oh and by the way, as it turns out the weekend really is a bad time to post anything to facebook. These days, only about 30% of employers block facebook so most people spend time on the site while at work. So you can post a vote request on a sunday morning (like I did today before I saw the Virtue study) but it won’t get you too many clicks.

Oh and PS: Happy Mother’s Day from VCN and Mark Wahlberg!

-

Ringo announces the winner of his video contest

Posted by Dan L. on May 10th, 2012

It seems like a lot of bands are running music video contests these days and I always stay far away from them. Producing 3 or 4 minutes of interesting video content is pretty damn hard. And for some weird reason, the prizes are usually pretty small. Ringo Starr just ran a music video contest for his new song “Wings” and even though Ringo has got to be like a mega-super-millionaire the grand prize was only $3,000. I happen to think Ringo is awesome and I doubt he had much to do with the contest. But these small prizes just guarantee that there won’t be too many great entries. Of course, the winner does get a credit as the director of Ringo’s official music video. And that’s pretty sweet. But that credit kind of seems less impressive if you know the video was made for a contest.

Anyways, like I said, Ringo is cool. And the video he made to announce the winner of his contest is pretty funny. You can tell that someone probably just pulled him into his backyard to shoot this. Then even though a incredibly loud plane flies right overhead, Ringo kept going. So one take was all that Ringo had time for. But he does say something pretty perfect at the end that saves the whole video:

And now here’s the music video that won the contest. As you’ll hear/see, this was a really hard song to make a video for since there were long breaks where there weren’t any lyrics:

You can read the details of the contest or see more entries right here. Peace and love, peace and love, peace and love.

How to win your first video contest

Posted by Dan L. on May 6th, 2012

About once a week I’ll get a nice e-mail from a new or longtime reader of VCN that I’ve never heard from before. They usually ask me about a post I did or about some contest that they want to enter. I always like to hear about other filmmakers’ contest experiences so I usually ask these folks what kind of contests they’ve entered and if they’ve ever had any cool wins. Most of the time, the responses I get are very similar. It seems like most new video contest filmmakers exclusively enter the big competitions like Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest or Gain’s “Smell Like a Million Bucks” promotion.

And that always kind of surprises me. It’s just not very good strategy. I understand that gigantic cash prizes can be exciting but the odds are really stacked against you in those big contests. Consequently, most of the people who write me say they’ve never won a video contest before. I even heard from one guy last year who said he had entered about 80 video contests but had never actually won one. And that’s pretty messed up since video contests are so ridiculously easy to win!

If you want to win a video contest, you just have to employ a little STRATEGY. Filmmakers should definitely enter huge long-shot contests but you should never put all your eggs in one basket. If you want to actually start winning contests you need to think SMALL. It seems like most video contest filmmakers want to make one big, quick payday. That kind of plan almost never works out. (However the guy who won a million dollars in this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest with his commercial “” had never entered a video contest before) If you only go after prizes that are say, over $25,000 you’re probably just going to waste a bunch of time and money and eventually get frustrated and quit. If you want to turn video contests into a steady source of income, you have to get your first win under your belt as soon as possible. Not only will a win boost your confidence, it will get you hooked on the feeling that comes with winning and inspire you to enter more contests.

So if you’ve never won a video contest before, it’s time you got your first win out of the way. Next time you’re on onlinevideocontests.com, scroll past all the big money contests and look for contests with prizes under $1,000. Go through those and look at the details carefully. Then pick the one that sounds like you would have the best chance of winning and enter it. You might just be the only person who does. You see…most people are naturally lazy and greedy. I don’t mean that as a slam against the human race. It’s just they way we are. The vast majority of people will look at contests with $500 or $250 prizes and figure it’s not worth their time to enter. But that’s not logical. If you enter the Crash the Super Bowl contest, you will be in the running to win up to one million dollars. But your odds of just making the finals are about 1 in 1,200. So if you enter The Crash, you’re going to spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours entering a contest you will almost certainly lose.

On the flip side, if you enter a tiny contest that almost no one will enter, you can spend nothing and have an incredibly decent shot at winning some cash. For example, every year Apartments.com runs a big video contest to find the “Roommate of the Year.” A ton of people always enter and one person wins $10,000 plus a year’s worth of free rent. But this year, Apartments.com is also running a small weekly contest in conjunction with the big contest. People are supposed to get on camera and in 30 seconds demonstrate what makes them a good roommate. The prize is $250 per week. I came across this contest about 2 weeks ago and believe it or not, Apartments.com got ZERO entries the first week! All somebody had to do was spend an hour shooting and uploading anything and it would have won. But nobody bothered. By the second week, only 2 people had entered and the sponsor had to pick a winning video that was just shot with a camera phone. I’ve won a lot of very nice video contest prizes in my day but I’m not an idiot. I knew this contest would be an easy 250 bucks so I entered and I won last week. Click this image to see my video:

Click to watch!

I happen to think that was a pretty hilarious entry. But quality didn’t even matter because no one else entered last week! My only competition was this video which had been submitted the week before. It took me about 2 hours to shoot, edit and upload my entry. My only expense was a $12 pizza which I of course got to eat later. So basically, I earned $125 per/hour on this contest. Now, I probably win 5 or 6 small prizes like this every year. (The day I won this contest I got another $250 check in the mail from a different contest.) An extra $1,500 can really change your life so those little contests are absolutely worth your time and attention. Think about it this way; if you need some extra money, would you rather spend 20 hours a year entering small video contests or 182 hours a year working a part-time, minimum wage job?

If you’re excited by this idea, I have some good news for you. There is still one more week left in Apartments.com’s weekly contest. The deadline to enter is this wednesday at noon and once again, no new entries have been received all week. So if you shoot and upload an entry ASAP you’ll probably discourage other people from entering and you’ll win. I’m telling you, there is a $250 bill on the ground….go pick it up:

The Apartments.com contest is just the tip of the iceberg. There are always a few tiny contests like this running. Most people don’t bother to even look at the details of these contests so they never see just how easy they are to enter. Hell, right now Monster energy drinks is running a video contest to find a new “intern.” The first 250 people that enter win $100 in swag. They’ve only gotten about 100 entries so far. All you gotta do is sit in front of a camera for 60 second and talk about Monster and BOOM….you just won your first ever video contest prize. Here’s the to enter.

Good luck, everybody. If you actually enter and win either of these contests let me know!

Garnier-Fructis buys $45,000 worth of Poptent videos

Posted by Dan L. on May 4th, 2012

Man, I’ll tell you what, I always manage to enter the wrong Poptent assignments. I never seem to pick the ones where the brand decides to buy more videos than they promised. These surprise, multiple-purchases are still the one thing that sets Poptent apart from all the other contests sites out there. Other companies do offer more, smaller prizes per contest but Poptent is the only place where you might end up with more than one first place “winner.”

For example: this week, Poptent announced that Garnier-Fructis was purchasing 6 videos that were submitted to their recent “Live Fearless, Look Amazing” assignment for $7,500 each. The company was only obligated to buy two videos but they were so happy with the results the decided they could use 4 more. All the selected entries are pretty good. I especially like this one and not just because it features a cute girl in a bikini. The director made a great call and mounted a camera (a GoPro I assume) on the star’s surfboard.

Here’s another impressive entry. It’s a simple little video but I was kind of amazed by the concept. A Poptent member actually shot a Garnier-Fructis ad about gay men “living fearlessly” and the company it. That’s kinda cool, isn’t it?

In all, Garnier-Fructis only received 73 submissions to this assignment. So if you entered, your odds of making a sale were just 1 in 12. I think Poptent really needs to encourage more brands to commit to buying multiple videos. If a company has a budget for as many as 6 videos, why not promise to buy at least 3 or 4? More guaranteed purchases lead to more and better submissions. By playing it safe, brands are actually sabotaging there chances of getting high quality ads. This time the sponsor lucked out and got some really good videos. But if Garnier-Fructis had promised to buy 6 videos right from the start, they probably would have gotten 200+ submissions.