2013 August | Video Contest News - Featuring News about Video Contests!

DO IT FOR AMERICA and maybe some prize money: Explain the benefits of the Affordable Care Act!

Posted by Dan L. on August 28th, 2013

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Are you excited for October 1st!? I know I sure am. 10/1/13 is opening day for the heath insurance exchanges that were created under the Affordable Care Act! I’m genuinely psyched about this because I’m sick and tired of all the lies, half-truths and rumors ~~Fox News~~ some conservatives have been gleefully spreading about this thing we all call “Obamacare.” If you only get your “news” from the right-wing media, you probably believe that most Americans hate The Affordable Care Act and want to see it repealed and/or defunded before this country turns into the Soviet States of America. But what Rush Limbaugh and Megan Kelly and Sean Hannity and your uncle Jeff won’t tell you is that a lot of the individual components of the Affordable Care act actually score through the roof with people across the political spectrum. You know those ACA Insurance Exchanges I mentioned? Well according to this 2012 Reuters poll….

80% of Republicans favor “creating an insurance pool where small businesses and uninsured have access to insurance exchanges to take advantage of large group pricing benefits.” That’s backed by 75 percent of independents.

That’s right….80% of the people who are cheering on Ted Cruz’s suicidal efforts to de-fund Obamacare by shutting down the entire government actually support many of the key components of the law. But conservatives have done such an amazing job distorting the facts about the ACA that millions of people still don’t understand what it actually does. (It seems like many just think it’s free insurance for lazy poor people.) Actually, in a weird coincidence, a moderate-conservative friend of mine called me today to tell me she just got fired. Obviously she was bummed but she was especially freaked out about losing her health insurance in 30 days. She said she was going to sign up for that COBRA thing which costs a fortune. I told her, “Hey, by october 1st you can go to one of the Obamacare exchanges and get a great deal on insurance. And since you’re unemployed, you may even qualify for Medicare!” She thought I was joking. She had no idea she could do that thanks to the ACA.

And that’s why I’m looking forward to October 1st. Your Uncle Jeff will probably, finally shut up about Obamacare after his kid with Diabetes is able to buy affordable health insurance for the first time in his life. Once Americans actually start to experience the benefits of this law, they’re going to realize that it’s not an evil new form of socialism. After October 1st, the fighting and the lies and the calls for repeal will probably begin to die down and we can all get back to arguing about important issues like Syria and Miley Cyrus’ butt cheeks.

So if you’d like to help spread the word about the good stuff that the Affordable Care Act does you may want to enter the “Healthy Young America” video contest. It’s sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services and a group named Young Invincibles. The goal is to explain the benefits of the ACA and to encourage young Americans to sign up for heath insurance. There are lots of prizes at stake and First Place is worth $6,500. The deadline for entries is September 23rd. For more info and prize details, head here:

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How to increase your video’s view count by hacking youtube!

Posted by Dan L. on August 25th, 2013

Youtube hates this kid! This uber-leet haxxor wants to make your dreams of viral success (seem) to come true. Watch his video to learn the one weird trick that will cause your youtube view counts to (briefly) skyrocket!

Ok, that was obviously one of the dumbest things I’ve ever posted. But for some reason it just cracked me up the first time I saw it. To be totally honest, this is exactly the kind of cool “hacking” tutorial I would have posted if youtube existed when I was 11. (Except even at age 11 I would have known to shoot it horizontally) This tip may be pointless and goofy but I bet you’re thinking about trying it for yourself. I’m not ashamed to admit that I already did. Here’s a screenshot of some random video I took at an amusement park last year…

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Can you believe that shizz!? I hit the 17 Billion views mark! Yeah obviously this is completely phony but for one brief moment I got to know what it would feel like to be 10 times more popular than Lady Gaga and Charlie the finger-biter combined!

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Bridgestone’s (surprisingly good) “Teens Drive Smart” winners

Posted by Dan L. on August 18th, 2013

I don’t usually post the winners of “teen” video contest because as you’d expect, all the entries are shot by goofy kids and the winning videos are pretty much guaranteed to suck. But all of the winners of Bridgestone’s “2013 Teens Drive Smart” contest are actually kind of great. For this contest, teens were supposed to create short films about the importance of Safe driving. The top winners will all receive scholarships to the schools of their choice.

Bridgestone wound up getting more than 1,000 entries for this contest. A public vote determined a set of 10 finalists and then a panel of judges selected the winners. After the voting ended, Bridgestone awarded the grand prize to a young lady named Nicole Ricketts. Her bio says she’s currently perusing a degree in Business Administration. And that’s a damn shame because this girl is a natural born filmmaker. Her video is beautifully shot and perfectly edited. This ad alone could probably get her accepted by pretty much any film school in the country. So hopefully she’ll take her scholarship money and transfer to UCLA, ASAP.

First Place Winner. Prize: $25,000 scholarship:

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Bridgestone stays there’s a chance they may actually air that video as a PSA so you might actually see it on TV some day. I was kind of surprised to hear that the finalists in this contest were picked through a public vote because all of the other winners are pretty good too. I was particularly impressed by the writing and the effects in the video that won 3rd place:
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Third Place Winner. Prize: $10,000 Scholarship:

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If you’re a big fan of teen-made short films about safe driving habits, you can head here to watch the rest of Bridgestone’s Top 10.
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The ABCs of Death 2 is looking for its 26th director

Posted by Dan L. on August 16th, 2013

That baby’s mom is super ugly

All of you aspiring horror directors should take note; a sequel to the 2102 anthology “The ABCs of Death” is in the works and once again the producers are running a contest to find one of the short films that will make up the movie. In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, The ABCs of Death is broken up into 26 segments about ~~kittens~~ death. Each segment is shot by a different director and has a theme connected to one of the letters of the alphabet. When The first ABCs of Death was being made, the producers (Drafthouse Films) ran a contest to find the short that would represent the letter “T.” The winner was this weird (and NSFW) claymation video entitled, “T is for Toilet.”
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This promo gives an entertaining explanation of how the contest works. Warning: Like most video contest promos this one opens with a shot of a very loud screaming skull.
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I’m not really a horror guy so I’m probably not going to enter this one. But I do like the concept so I figured I’d mention it. This contest offers filmmakers a nice excuse to go out and shoot a high-quality short horror film. So even if you lose, you still walk away with a decent film that you can send to festivals and add to your reel. The deadline for this one is Halloween so you’ve got plenty of time to shoot something fancy. Head here to read the official submission guidelines.
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Hipster Videography 101: The Art of Lens Whacking

Posted by Dan L. on August 12th, 2013

When future film students start ~~writing papers~~ creating virtual reports about the visual styles of the 20-teens, those kids are going notice a whole lot of lens flares and light leaks. Right now, that dreamy, home movie-esque, Instagram-y look is all over the place. Most hipster photographers and videographers just slap some filters on their photos and videos and call it art. But you’re no poser so if you want want flares and light leaks, you should lean how to create them for real by “whacking” your DSLR’s lens. Vimeo’s Video School posted a great tutorial about the Art of Lens whacking and the site describes the practice thusly*….

Lens whacking, also called free lensing, is a method of shooting with the lens detached from the camera body. It allows light leaks, creates a tilt shift focus effect, and adds a dreamlike, vintage quality to your footage.

Here’s what a lens-whacked video looks like. If you can master this little trick you should be able to create some seriously cool looking footage:

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from on .

Vimeo says that entire video was shot with the lens detached from the camera. Here’s how the trick works:

Normally the only light that hits your camera’s sensor is filtered through the lens. When you remove the lens, light can hit the sensor from many different angles. If too much light is let in your image will be over-exposed and hard to make out – but if you let just a bit in, you’ll get some lovely lens flares and light leaks.

Now that you’ve read these descriptions you probably already understand how to whack your lens. Basically you just detach your lens from your DSLR and then hold it in place while you shoot. If you tilt it a little, light will leak in through the opening. Vimeo does a very thorough job of describing how to correctly whack your lens so to read the full tutorial.

*Please note, “thusly” is not exactly a real word. So every time you say it, stuck up people will think you’re dumb. But screw those pretentious jerks because “thusly” is a fun word and you should use as much as you want.

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Facebook is going to start shoving commercials into your (already spam-filled) newsfeed

Posted by Dan L. on August 5th, 2013

Glob help us. According to Bloomberg, Facebook is about to get a hell of a lot more annoying. An unnamed source from inside the company claims that Facebook will soon start selling 15-second long “TV-style ads” for as much as 2.5 Million dollars a day. Where would those commercials go? Right in your newsfeed of course. This is from Bloomberg:

While the social network already allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user’s news feed, the new service would let marketers buy their way directly into a person’s feed with a 15-second pitch, according to the people. That’s typically the minimum length of a television commercial.

It’s still not clear how exactly this is going to work. But to me it sounds like these commercials are going to be set to (ugh) auto-play. It’s the only way this plan would make sense. Right now, a company can make a video and post it to facebook and ~~everyone~~ lots of people who like the company’s page will see the video in their news feed. This new plan would get ads in front of users even if they don’t like the sponsors page but that fact alone doesn’t really warrant the 2.5 million dollar price tag. And it also doesn’t fit with Facebook’s desire to compete with TV networks for advertisers. Again, this is from Bloomberg:

With Facebook, the idea would be to capitalize on the millions of users who actively check the site on a daily basis, including during the prime-time hours coveted by television advertisers. As of last quarter, 61 percent of Facebook members were using the site daily — a number that has risen despite management predictions that it would decline.

“Every night, 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during prime-time TV hours in the United States alone,” Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week on a conference call about second-quarter results.

It looks like Ad Age has actually been on this story for a while and their sources have been talking about auto-play ads since last year. This is from an Ad Age article from December:

In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically — a dynamic known as “autoplay” — according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

And here’s a new Ad Age story from April:

While the format of the units isn’t totally nailed down, it’s widely assumed that they’ll be autoplay and presented in a video player that expands beyond the main news-feed real estate to cover the right- and left-hand rails of users’ screens on the desktop version of Facebook, which Ad Age reported in December. (Facebook has also been at work on a way to make video ads stand out on mobile apps, though it’s still unclear how it intends to accomplish this.)

So….isn’t that exciting! Now we all get to sit and watch a 15-second commercial before we’re allowed to start using facebook. I’m sure that everyone will love this new feature and no one one, anywhere will complain. Ok but seriously people are going to lose their shit the first time an autoplay ad pops up in their newsfeed. I think a lot of users will just start clicking away from Facebook rather than sit through the same commercial over and over and over. And yes, you will see the same videos many, many times because apparently the ads will be targeted. So heavy users can expect to see the same commercials up to 3 times a day.

But there is a little bit of good news here. A lot of companies are already using video contests and open spec assignments to get video content for their facebook pages. So I think we’re going to see a lot of big commercial contests where the goal will be to find new auto-play ads for facebook. These commercials are going to have to be entertaining as hell to ensure that people don’t leave facebook whenever a commercial pops up. Creating funny, unique, compelling videos ain’t easy and I think a lot of companies will get frustrated and eventually turn to “the crowd” for wacky, outside-the-box style content.

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Green Day gives a kick ass video a lame ass prize

Posted by Dan L. on August 1st, 2013

Last year Green Day went nuts and released 37 new songs at once. The tracks were spread out over three albums entitled ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, and ¡TRE! To promote the new records, Green Day launched a video contest on the crowdsourcer site, TalentHouse. Filmmakers and fans were asked to create a short film or music video that was inspired by any one of the 37 new songs. There was a round of public voting but the guys from Green Day were the only judges whose opinions mattered. Here’s the video they picked as the grand prize winner. It’s by far one of the best music video contest entries I’ve ever seen. It was created by an aspiring animator named Kyle Stein who’s currently a Studio Art major at the University of Pittsburgh.
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I can’t even imagine how many hundreds of hours of work went into this thing. And you know what? The song, Nuclear Family, ain’t bad either. So the winning video is great but unfortunately, the prize that Green Day promised the winner is pretty lame. For his efforts, Kyle got interviewed on Green Day’s website and he’s going to receive a Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR and some accessories. But his entry isn’t even going to become the “official” music video for this track. (Here’s the . It’s nothing fancy.) It’s nice that Green Day is promoting this guy’s work but if they named his submission their “official” music video they’d really be helping out his career. I mean seriously, “produced and animated the official music video for the Green Day track, Nuclear Family” would look pretty damn good on a college kid’s resume, wouldn’t it? Or at the very least the band could have tossed him a couple grand for his efforts. Tons of musicians are now getting their music videos from contests like this but normally the bands wind up paying at least $5,000 to the winner. The good news is that the director the winning video does seem pretty happy with his prize. You can read more about this kid and his process in his official interview for GreenDay.com.

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