By Ken Liebeskind
SAN DIEGO --To promote a new camcorder that provides filmmakers with an easy way to create user generated content, JVC ran a contest at a user generated site for filmmakers to shoot a JVC commercial. The winning spot played on national TV and is running online.
The contest ran at VMIX.com, the site run by VMIX Media that plays independently produced videos and music.
“User generated content is the rage among marketers and we want to do it as an element in our campaign to get our message out and be cutting edge,” said Karl Bearnarth, JVC’s senior vice president of marketing. “VMIX has a robust site that enables consumers to share their content. We make a product that makes it easy to develop user generated content, so it worked well on the site.”
The new product is the Everio, the first tapeless camcorder that records onto a hard disc drive. “They can shoot their videos, edit them on a PC or Mac and upload them to sites for sharing or entering a contest like this,” Bearnarth said.
The contest ran from October to late December and generated over 80 entries. The winner was Martin Whittier, an aspiring filmmaker from Perryville, MD who operates Brumar Films, a production company. The winning spot, called “Danger Man,” featured a motorcyclist driving up a steep hill in a park before the camera is shown. Whittier used a JVC GY-HD100U camera, jvc a 720 hi def camcorder, for the shoot.
The spot played on Spike TV on Feb. 8 during the show Pros vs. Joes. It is also running on the VMIX and JVC websites.
The contest was an example of a campaign from VMIX, which “works with major brands to develop an online presence,” according to the company’s CEO Greg Kostello. “Companies come up with a great idea but don’t have the interactive team or the time to do it. We can get it up and running quickly.”
“JVC was looking to put their brand on the site and connect with new users to get the message out on the new product and have an interactive experience you can’t find anywhere else on the Net,” said David Brown, VMIX’s VP of brand entertainment.
“13 Steps” Documentary Delves Into Strides Made By Olympian Edwin Moses–On The Track and Off
Not long after Edwin Moses figured out how to attack the solution to track's ultimate math problem, he transformed himself into the best hurdler in history.
That, in turn, gave the engineer-turned-Olympic champion the platform to go after more difficult issues that, even today, more than 40 years later, nobody has totally untangled.
The title to a new documentary on Moses, "13 Steps," pays homage to the then-revolutionary number of strides the track star took between the 10 barriers in the notoriously painful 400-meter hurdles — a race where he lined up 122 straight times over a span of 9 years, 9 months and 9 days without getting beat.
"Everyone's angry about something, but what can you do and what are you going to do?" Moses says in the movie, reflecting on the larger-than-sports role he assumed after becoming one of track's brightest lights in the 1970s and '80s.
The film, which debuts to the public Saturday at his alma mater, Morehouse College, dissects Moses' role in three causes that remain unresolved: fair pay for athletes in track and the Olympics; doping; and racial equality in America.
Moses knew he could not replicate Tommie Smith and John Carlos
Born in 1955, Moses was 13 when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics, gestures that made them pariahs for decades both inside the Olympic movement and out.
Those lessons put the world's best hurdler in no position to follow suit when he won in 1976. Some tried to portray his victory lap in Montreal with his white American teammate, Mike Shine, as something bigger, but as Moses says in an interview shortly after those Olympics, he simply viewed it as a spur-of-the-moment burst of un-symbolic... Read More