Yesterday I posted the news that Godaddy had postponed the announcement of the winners of their humongous until October 27th. According to the contest site, the winners were originally supposed to be announced “on or around October 18th.”

After the post went up I got a tip from a reader that said that some or all of the winners of the contest had been notified. Now if you just won a giant cash prize in a video contest, what’s the first thing you’d do? Call your mom? Sure, ok. Then what? You’d probably start spreading the good news across the tweet-o-sphere, right? Well I checked twitter and the word about who won is out, big time. So here, one week early is the grand prize winner of the Summer Edition of the Godaddy commercial contest!

Godaddy First Place Winner. Prize: $250,000:

You’ll have to wait until next week to see the “web only version” I suppose.  Now I watched all 215 entries in this contest and “Russel’s Notebook” is probably the video I would have picked as the first place winner too.  It looks amazing, it has a ton of production value and the song is even kind of catchy.  And tapping into Glee phenomenon was just a stroke of genius.  So it’s no surprise at all that this won.  But what is surprising is who made this video.  It was created by a group called Wayside Creations. Wayside Creations is the team behind the very excellent IndyMogul.com and the web series Back Yard FX!  I actually have Indy Mogul listed in our side bar under “Video Contest Resources” because it’s such a great site.  Last year, I even won $2,000 in a video contest using muppet-like puppets I learned how to build thanks to an episode of Back Yard FX.  So if you’ve never checked out the site, it has a lot of very handy tricks for low-budget filmmakers on there.

Speaking of low-budget, I just checked the Indy Mogul forum and apparently, this entry only cost about $500 to produce.  Amazing.  But obviously, the filmmakers probably have a ton of resources at their disposal.  So today’s lesson is this; if you have good gear and skilled people who know how to use it, you don’t need to spend a ton of money to make a great video.