I just got back from a meeting with a director friend of mine. I’m very happy to say that she has agreed to direct my video submission for the Dockers contest! Dockers requires that the entrants that make it into the next round submit either a video and/or photos as well as a written essay. When round one ends contestants are given only ten days to get their submissions in. That’s not much time, so we’ve got to start now and pull this together very quickly even though I don’t know at this point whether I will make it into the top 50 or not.
This afternoon I typed up a first draft outline of my idea and gave her a copy. We talked about locations versus a studio, equipment, scenes, actors, and the general look of the video. She had some really great creative ideas that will save me some money. Speaking of money, we’re going to have to keep the costs really low, but I’m still going to have to come up with some money to fund this, which is going to be a challenge since I’m broke right now. So finding the funding is going to be my quest for the next few days. Then I’m going to be making a lot of phone calls and getting prices on services and equipment. That’s a bit backwards from the way it’s usually done, but necessary in this case.
You may be wondering where we are with regards to votes now that we’ve been at this contest for almost a week. Well, we’re not quite where the numbers need to be yet. As of this writing we have 40 people voting and 95 votes.
I’ve been scoping out the competition…trying to get a handle on who the motivated players are. Dockers says that they are supposed to be announcing the top scorers in the near future and I wish they would. There are literally hundreds of entries and trying to check them all out is a huge task! (Anybody want to volunteer to do that?) But I can’t wait for whenever Dockers is going to get that list together. I need to have some idea of where we stand in this competition. So I spent several hours the other morning going through a ton of entries. Not all, mind you, but enough to realize that there are some heavy hitters out there competing against us.
I counted 33 entries with numbers higher than ours. So does this mean we’re safe and getting into the top 50? No, not at all, because I didn’t look at all the entries. There could be 17 entries with more votes than us that I haven’t seen yet. So we are far from safe. The number of votes of the top three contestants (that I saw) were 660, 788, and 901. So we are really trailing behind. Granted, they had a two-week head start on us, but we really need more voters and we need voters to vote every single day!
Ideally, I want to be in the top five. Since Dockers has made this a voting contest, it makes sense that being one of the top vote getters is going to be a factor in their judging. They are most likely looking to back a project that is popular, among other things. What’s really hurting us right now is that the I-Maniac Fan Club’s mailing list is broken. There are over 1,300 fans on that list that aren’t hearing about this contest. But can you imagine if they did and all started voting? We’d blow everyone out of the water! I’m working with the fan club president and trying to help get the mailing list fixed. In the meantime, if you know any fellow I-Man fans, please let them know about this contest and that their help is urgently needed. Be sure to send them the link to my entry. I’ve placed the link to my entry right on the home page of the Shoom Zone website, so if you ever need to find it quickly, go to www.shoomzone.com.