The results from the Machinima.com contest are in, and… WE WON!!! To celebrate, I’ve posted the video on YouTube (not much of a celebration, I know).
First of all, let me answer this question — “what’s up with the dialogue in that video?”. I’m glad you asked. The dialogue came from a Kentucky Fried Chicken new employee training video that Jonathan Coulton found online somewhere. Something about it struck him, so he decided to turn it into a song, which I have now turned into a video.
For completeness’ sake, let me reiterate the story of this video in this blog post, even though I’ve mentioned parts of it elsewhere. Machinima.com UK held a video contest where the contestants could make a machinima video for either of two Jonathan Coulton songs, Bacteria or Todd the T-1000. Oddly, given how many Halo videos there were, there were only a couple of “T-1000″ videos; most were for “Bacteria”. Mine was the only WoW video.
Now, since it was a Machinima.com UK contest, you had to be a resident of the UK to enter a video. I am not from the UK, but I emailed the Machinima guys to find out if the video maker had to be from the UK, or just the video enterer. They said, “As long as the person entering the video is from the UK, that’s all that matters”. That’s clear enough, so I contacted Kerrin from the Jonathan Coulton Project (who is from the UK) to see if he’d post my video in the contest. He said yes, so I made the video.
It was not a smooth contest. There was supposed to be a full week of online voting, but the voting mechanism on the site didn’t work and it took them four days to finally fix it, leaving only three days for voting. I had initially planned on doing no special promotion of my video, figuring I’d kind of fly under the radar and see if my video could win based on its own merits. That plan got derailed a bit when a video was posted by a guy named ProudN00b, and it immediately got almost 300 views in the first 24 hours. That made me realize that there were other machinima artists who had fanbases of whatever size, and that since they were obviously sending their fans to go view and vote on their video, if I didn’t do the same thing, I’d get crushed. Not wanting to get crushed, I whipped up a “please go vote for me video” and posted it to YouTube once the Machinima.com voting problems had been worked out.
That ended up working pretty well. In addition to voting my video up pretty high, my fans (that’s you guys. thanks!) also seemed to have not really dug Proudn00b’s video and voted his down, which upset him a bit. On the Machinima.com forums, he and a few others began lamenting the fact that the voting system was essentially a popularity contest (which is true), and demanded that Machinima.com change the way they scored the contest (there was never any chance of them doing that though; they wouldn’t even change the voting period after having lost over half of it to broken voting functionality). There were even claims that we (Kerrin plus me) were cheating, having people artificially jack with the scores by giving my video high marks and everyone else low marks. For the record, we never even asked people to vote 5 stars for my video. All we ever said was, “please go watch the video and give it as many stars as you think it deserves”. We certainly weren’t encouraging people to crater other people’s videos.
In the end, our video ended up on top, so we won! The prize is a sweet Alienware gaming laptop, which Kerrin gets to keep. Shipping electronics overseas is a pain in the butt, and I don’t really need a PC laptop (I’m a Mac man), and I couldn’t have won it without Kerrin’s help anyway. Besides, there’s maybe a little bit of justice in the fact that the prize at least will be staying in the UK.
