Online video has “reinvented the world of moving image,” said David-Michel Davies, executive director of The Webby Awards, during Monday night’s Webby Film & Video Awards presentation at New World Stages in New York City. This is the eleventh year of The International Academy of Arts and Sciences Webby Awards, but the first for film & video, which signals the arrival of the new medium.
Awards were given in a number of categories, but there wasn’t one for video advertising. However, some of the winning videos were ad related, most notably “The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments,” by Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, which won the Best Viral Award.
The geyser-like spewing of Diet Coke from cans containing Mentos candies was filmed by the pair in their hometown of Buckfield, ME after six months of research. The idea had been suggested by a friend. The first video was posted at Revver.com on May 31, 2006 and it was an instant success, receiving over five million hits in two months. The video was so popular that Revver sold advertising with it, to Microsoft and other major advertisers. The video was also posted at Grobe’s and Voltz’s site, www.eepybird.com.
Grobe and Voltz appear in the video, so it was shot by a friend, Mike Miclon.
After the first video played, “Mentos called right away,” Grobe said, with Coke calling last August. “The second video was sponsored by Diet Coke and Mentos, they provided materials and paid the production costs,” Grobe said.
The second video featured a chain reaction or domino effect. “One bottle triggers the next one and 250 bottles were used,” Voltz said.
The second video also featured a tag at the end, which was an ad for Diet Coke that promoted Poetry in Motion, a video contest that called for videos of “ordinary objects doing extraordinary things, which doubled traffic at Coke.com,” according to Grobe.
Mike Donnelly, The Coca-Cola Company’s director of interactive media, said Grobe and Voltz judged the contest and their video was “an inspiration for entries.” A winner was chosen last week. Donnelly also said Coke relaunched its strategy of interactive media last July to focus on consumer generated media, which is why the company reached out to Grobe and Voltz. “The timing was perfect,” he said.
The Best Actor Award at the Webbys was Ninja, star of Ask A Ninja, a series of comedy webisodes created by Los Angeles improvisational comedians Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine. When asked who the actor playing Ninja is, Nichols wouldn’t say. When asked if it was Sarine, he remained silent, but he was willing to discuss the advertising. The episodes, which play at www.askaninja.com, feature five second pre-rolls and fifteen second ads that run near the end. The series started in November, 2005 and advertising started last August. Nichols and Sarine signed a deal in January with Federated Media Publishing/Sausalito, Calif. the company that sells advertising for blogs and other websites. Ask.com bought a three month sponsorship and started running ads on May 18, Nichols said.
There’s lots of online video advertising now, but the advertising successes of these videographers suggests that independent video producers can support their work and even profit from it. Grobe and Voltz started with a revenue share from Revver and are on to bigger and better things, including a new series of videos they wouldn’t discuss at the show. Nichols and Sarine received a huge payout from Federated and a generous revenue share. There was plenty of jubilation on Monday night as the videographers and the rest of the winners celebrated their achievements.
Review: Rachel Morrison Makes Feature Directorial Debut With “The Fire Inside”
"The Fire Inside," about boxer Claressa "T-Rex" Shields, is not your standard inspirational sports drama, even if it feels like it for the first half of the movie.
There's the hopeless dream, the difficult home life, the blighted community, the devoted coach, the training montages, the setbacks and, against all odds, the win. We've seen this kind of story before, you might think, and you'd be right. But then the movie pulls the rug out from under you: The victory is not the end. "The Fire Inside," directed by Rachel Morrison and written by Barry Jenkins, is as much about what happens after the win. It's not always pretty or inspirational, but it is truthful, and important.
Sports dramas can be just as cliche as fairy tales, with the gold medal and beautiful wedding presented as a happy ending. We buy into it time and time again for obvious reasons, but the idea of a happy ending at all, or even an ending, is almost exclusively for the audience. We walk away content that someone has found true love or achieved that impossible goal after all that work. For the subject, however, it's a different proposition; Life, and all its mundanities, disappointments and hardships, continues after all. And in the world of sports, that high moment often comes so young that it might be easy to look at the rest of the journey as a disappointing comedown.
Claressa Shields, played by Ryan Destiny in the film, was only 17 when she went to the 2012 London Olympics. Everything was stacked against her, including the statistics: No American woman had ever won an Olympic gold medal in the sport before. Her opponents had years on her. She was still navigating high school in Flint, Michigan, and things on the home front were volatile and lacking. Food was sometimes scarce... Read More