WCS Contest Raises Awareness of Mobile Video Opportunities
Submitted by Pocketcine on February 6, 2007 - 12:25pm.
You would think that mobile video would not need to be proselytized. After all there is a daily flood of news releases about mobile video arriving in mailboxes.
However, what I have discovered is that digital artists are only peripherally aware of the medium. They know it’s coming, sometime in the future. But they are just too busy to study it from the point of view of production. Plus there is a dearth of information about creating and deploying mobile video on cell phones. I imagine it was like telephones when they first came along. People knew how to talk to each other, but they had to learn how use the new technology created to make a new form of talking possible.
The “Worst Case Scenario” contest Pocketcine ran in partnership with Raincoast Books was designed to raise awareness of the medium and encourage experimentation. The contest ran in 92 bookstores across Canada, plus online at Amazon.ca and chapters.indigo.ca. As noted in a previous blog, it was the most successful contest ever run by Raincoast, in terms of participating stores.
Well, the results are in, and we will be announcing a winner on February 8. Want to know how many entries we got? Three. While we can safely say that the number of entries did not exceed our expectations, does this mean the contest was a failure?
For perspective, we are currently running a mobile video contest at the huge Renderosity site, which has well over 200,000 registered users. Renderosity is an amateur and professional artist site that regularly runs contests. The contest page is expected to get several million hits. Unlike the “Worst Case Scenarios” (WCS) contest, the theme is wide open. Artists can even submit work previously created for other venues or projects. The prizes are cash ($500, $200 and $100 US dollars) rather than a book shopping spree of $500 at participating bookstores in the case of the WCS contest. This makes the prize more desirable. So how many entries does Renderosity expect, based on their past experience? Twenty. The reason? Animations and videos are very labor compared to single images or photography stills. So given the reach of the WCS contest, three entries is par for the course. Why did we do the contest then? Because several million pairs of eyeballs on the contest page is a large audience that would have cost a lot more if we paid for them. ($60,000 US at .03 cents a page impression).
There are some other interesting statistics that point to the value of the contest. The contest home page on Pocket Cine’s website got 1293 page impressions, the entry form received 82 submissions (the majority spam), and the most interesting statistic of all, 413 people registered for the contest electronic newsletter.
There were a lot of people interested, but it seems when it came time to do the work, most of the potential submitters were too busy to devote time to creating the videos.
Actually this makes sense to me based on my experience with artists I have worked with on mobile videos last year. Artists who had full time jobs as animators, working for large game companies, failed to deliver on schedule or at all. The reason? Deadlines came crashing down on them at work. The freelance artist I hired delivered on time, given a little nudging on my part.
I created a Google Alert to capture any mention of the contest on the Internet. Raincoast put out two press releases in November and early December. There was a flood of websites that ran the release, some with comments when the news releases first came out. Then there was a steady stream of websites running the releases (at least three a day) for the entire month of January, right up to the day the contest closed. It would be impossible to calculate how many eyes saw the contest press release, but it is bound to be a huge number.
There were over 24,000 hits on the Pocketcine website during this period, although only 1293 clicked through to the contest home page. I am guessing that a large number of the home page hits read about the contest on the home page and then explored various articles I have written about mobile video on the site. There is also 520 hits on the ad for the contest on YouTube.
So I would say for the money that Mobile Muse invested in this project, there has been an excellent value in the two contests in terms of creating awareness among artists about this new medium and its opportunities, and technical and creative challenges.
However, what I have discovered is that digital artists are only peripherally aware of the medium. They know it’s coming, sometime in the future. But they are just too busy to study it from the point of view of production. Plus there is a dearth of information about creating and deploying mobile video on cell phones. I imagine it was like telephones when they first came along. People knew how to talk to each other, but they had to learn how use the new technology created to make a new form of talking possible.
The “Worst Case Scenario” contest Pocketcine ran in partnership with Raincoast Books was designed to raise awareness of the medium and encourage experimentation. The contest ran in 92 bookstores across Canada, plus online at Amazon.ca and chapters.indigo.ca. As noted in a previous blog, it was the most successful contest ever run by Raincoast, in terms of participating stores.
Well, the results are in, and we will be announcing a winner on February 8. Want to know how many entries we got? Three. While we can safely say that the number of entries did not exceed our expectations, does this mean the contest was a failure?
For perspective, we are currently running a mobile video contest at the huge Renderosity site, which has well over 200,000 registered users. Renderosity is an amateur and professional artist site that regularly runs contests. The contest page is expected to get several million hits. Unlike the “Worst Case Scenarios” (WCS) contest, the theme is wide open. Artists can even submit work previously created for other venues or projects. The prizes are cash ($500, $200 and $100 US dollars) rather than a book shopping spree of $500 at participating bookstores in the case of the WCS contest. This makes the prize more desirable. So how many entries does Renderosity expect, based on their past experience? Twenty. The reason? Animations and videos are very labor compared to single images or photography stills. So given the reach of the WCS contest, three entries is par for the course. Why did we do the contest then? Because several million pairs of eyeballs on the contest page is a large audience that would have cost a lot more if we paid for them. ($60,000 US at .03 cents a page impression).
There are some other interesting statistics that point to the value of the contest. The contest home page on Pocket Cine’s website got 1293 page impressions, the entry form received 82 submissions (the majority spam), and the most interesting statistic of all, 413 people registered for the contest electronic newsletter.
There were a lot of people interested, but it seems when it came time to do the work, most of the potential submitters were too busy to devote time to creating the videos.
Actually this makes sense to me based on my experience with artists I have worked with on mobile videos last year. Artists who had full time jobs as animators, working for large game companies, failed to deliver on schedule or at all. The reason? Deadlines came crashing down on them at work. The freelance artist I hired delivered on time, given a little nudging on my part.
I created a Google Alert to capture any mention of the contest on the Internet. Raincoast put out two press releases in November and early December. There was a flood of websites that ran the release, some with comments when the news releases first came out. Then there was a steady stream of websites running the releases (at least three a day) for the entire month of January, right up to the day the contest closed. It would be impossible to calculate how many eyes saw the contest press release, but it is bound to be a huge number.
There were over 24,000 hits on the Pocketcine website during this period, although only 1293 clicked through to the contest home page. I am guessing that a large number of the home page hits read about the contest on the home page and then explored various articles I have written about mobile video on the site. There is also 520 hits on the ad for the contest on YouTube.
So I would say for the money that Mobile Muse invested in this project, there has been an excellent value in the two contests in terms of creating awareness among artists about this new medium and its opportunities, and technical and creative challenges.
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