Firefox Flicks Backstage

Hi. My name is Mark Kennedy and I work with the team making Celtx – the innovative application that’s used for the digital pre-production of film and TV content. Built on the Firefox Web browser, Celtx is proud to be a Friend of the Flicks Contest.

One the things we have noticed at Celtx is the number of visitors to our site that use Firefox as their Web browser. It only makes sense – Celtx is built on top of the Firefox technologies and all – but it also shows how like minded users of Celtx are to the Firefox community. Both communities are by default creative in nature. And both know a good thing when they see it!

Take for instance Banning High School in Wilmington, California, USA and compare them to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada . Although separated by 7,000 miles, and with entirely different cultures at play, both of these schools use Celtx in their filmmaking courses. And each use the award winning Firefox Web browser. In fact the NSCC uses both Firefox and Celtx in their filmmaking lab.

Form ‘Sea to shining Sea’, Firefox and Celtx are two friends you often find together.

I know we’re late on this but over the last few days I’ve been working on a couple of flyers and here they are.

If you’ve got access to a printer and there are bulletin boards or other (legal) places to post these flyers, please print some out and post them. We especially need help getting the word out around college campuses.

I’ve created five different flyers (actually three designs, and two color variations) for getting the word out. If you’ve already made flyers or want to make some, please do and send them my way. I’ll get them posted along with these.

The flyers are available in PDF format in large and medium sizes. The difference is the image quality, so if you’ve got the bandwidth and a decent color printer, I suggest grabbing the larger ones.

large – 5.1MB	large – 5.1MB	large – 5.1MB	large – 5.5MB	large – 6.3MB
medium – 0.5MB	medium – 0.3MB	medium – 0.3MB	medium – 0.6MB	medium – 0.6MB

update: I’ve updated the flyers to fix the typos (thanks for the catch, guys :-) and to reduce the overall file sizes. The medium sized flyers are now all under 1 MB so it should be easier to download. Tomorrow I hope to add a few new flyers that were just contributed. Stay tuned.

I just wanted to throw up a reminder that you can keep up to date on the latest Flicks goings on by subscribing to the Backstage web feed or by signing up for the mailing list.

If you’ve got a feed reader, or you use Firefox Live Bookmarks, you can easily subscribe to the Backstage feed to receive content as it’s posted (including ad submissions as they come in.) Firefox 1.5 users can simply click the orange Feed icon at the right end of the browser address bar to subscribe using Live Bookmarks. Users of other browsers can find the feed link at the bottom of any Backstage web page.

If you’re more of an email person, you can subscribe to our weekly updates mailing list, a digest of the week’s posts, simply by clicking visiting our Backstage subscription page.

Today we pushed out a media alert to talk about our new Friends of Firefox Flicks. You can read the press release here.

We’ve been developing some great relationships with organizations in the indy film world. I mentioned in an earlier post that we’d partnered with “Flicks Friend” Celtx and that they were going to help us with outreach.

Today I’d like to let you all know about two new Flicks Friends who have joined with the team to help promote the contest — and to make the rewards for participating even more exciting. The first of these new Friends to come on board was the Vail Film Festival. The Vail Film Festival is pretty new, this is their third year, but they’re growing really fast. Last year they screened more than 70 films including the directorial debuts of David Duchovny, Tiffany Thiessen, and Luke Wilson. The event drew 10,000 people.

We’ve been talking with the folks at Vail for about a month and one of the very exciting developments is that they would like to screen some of the leading entries at this year’s festival^(PDF) at the end of March. That’s right before the end of the contest, but we should have our shortlist by then and this is a great opportunity for the producers of the leading entries to get some amazing exposure for their work.

The second Friend that recently joined us is the New York Festivals. NYf awards the world’s best work in interactive and Internet communications, online advertising and alternative media and marketing. They’re going to be promoting Firefox Flicks at this week’s annual galas in celebration of the winners of the 2006 NYf awards for:

• Television, Cinema & Radio Advertising, and the AME Awards
• Film & Video
• Television Programming & Promotion.

In addition to helping out with Flicks promotions, we’re working with the NYf to offer an awesome opportunity to our first place winner. In addition to the $5,000 for purchasing that next piece of equipment that we’re already offering, the Firefox Flicks first place winner will automatically qualify as a Shortlist finalist in the 2006 New York Festivals of Advertising (NYFA) competition, and will be judged by NYf’s international panel of advertising and creative professionals to vie for Gold, Silver, or Bronze World Medals against the top ad agencies in the world. This is a huge opportunity for worldwide exposure and recognition and we’re very excited to be working with NYf to bring this to Firefox Flicks.

Things are getting exciting here at Firefox Flicks. Stay tuned to the Backstage blog!