Feedback
Hi everyone,
I’m one of the team here at Mozilla that’s been working on the Firefox Flicks campaign since we rolled this out back in December of 2005. We’re nearing the close of the initial stage of this campaign to promote Firefox, when we announce the winners from the contest portion of the campaign Thursday.
We read all of your comments here on the Backstage blog, and we take your feedback seriously. Over the past couple of weeks, since we launched the video sharing site here at firefoxflicks.com, we’ve heard from some of you that you’re frustrated that all the videos aren’t available right away for viewing. And you’ve also told us that a big part of the value for participating comes from exposure of your work to as large an audience as possible.
The contest and its wrapup are the first part of ongoing outreach we’ll be conducting around Firefox Flicks over the coming months. We’ll be posting every video that was submitted for Firefox Flicks within the next two weeks. And we will continue to drive exposure for Flicks creators, so that people interested in Firefox get a chance to see the work you’ve done.
It isn’t often that you get the chance to see firsthand the creativity and passion that hundreds of people put into their art. I’m absolutely blown away by the contributions all of you have made to our goal of telling millions of people about Firefox. This is the beginning of Firefox Flicks, not the end.
From all of us here, thank you.
Paul Kim
Director, Product Marketing
Mozilla
April 26th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Mr. Kim,
The prompt and pleasant words are pleasant and prompt but don’t answer the questions raised about the judging, nor address the legitimate reasons for their being posed.
April 27th, 2006 at 6:54 am
Firefox Flicks Team,
Hey guys, I’m one of the folks who submitted a video to the contest and was lucky enough have it posted online. I think, in general, you did an excellent job of keeping all informed and updated on the contest, and the system you had going seemed to have worked quite well. I would like to give a little bit of feedback since it seems appropriate to this forum, and it is heartening to hear that you listen to the comments.
While it may be valuable to be all-inclusive with your contest and product, I feel that the comments section of the videos was a little bit too much of a free for all, so to speak. Comments could be made by anyone, regardless of their value or intelligence. It is somewhat risky to provide an open forum in a contest situation that will inevitably have a lot of sore losers. I think in the next edition of the contest you should keep the star-rating system (1-10, perhaps) in order to sort clips by popularity, but do away with the comments.
I also think it is a mistake to post all 250 clips online, as this is will simply be too many. There will be, to be blunt, a lot of sub-par work that could potentially de-value the contest. I think it would be best to stick to the top 25 (or 10%) as an example of what came out of the contest. There was never any promise to put everything online, so why devalue the brand? I don’t think people will stick around to watch many videos, and if they see one or two that they find uninteresting they may never come back to see more or, worse, find Firefox to be a less professional organization.
Finally, I think the prizes in the next edition should be more carefully considered. As examples of two other similar contests that are going on right now, I would look at the American Express 15-second clip competition for the Tribeca Film Festival or “The Project” (theproject.tv) Student Film Contest. The prize for the AmEx contest is $15,000 plus three nights in New York and for the Student Film Competition, $25,000 for 1st place $15,000 for 2nd and $10,000 for 3rd. The Firefox Flicks prizes seemed kind of paltry considering the scope of the competition and the net worth of the Mozilla Corp. Even for $50,000, it still seems like a rather good deal.
Overall I think that it turned out quite well. If the contest runs again I’m sure you will be more clear on what you will be using the videos for as you will have figured it out by then. (Viral, for TV, as web-ads?) All in all, nice job. A lot of interesting things came out of it for sure.
All the best.
April 27th, 2006 at 7:29 am
I would have to agree with the first comment.
I am perplexed to the lack of any kind of feedback from Flicks regarding my ad. I emailed Asa a blog post (as requested via email) with a picture that was never published, never received any confirmation about my DVD being received, and received no reply when I later emailed asking if I could write a new blog post (after reading a comment from Asa that getting a post was as simple as emailing it to Flix).
It is the lack of feedback that I find troubling. With my video not on the site and being ignored by Asa via email, right now I have no idea if my DVD was ever even received for consideration (I did receive confirmation for the online segment, however). I am not saying my ad deserves to win (there are many wonderful entries), but I am worried that some people such as myself were lost in the shuffle of going through so many ads.
April 27th, 2006 at 7:41 am
Using the judging criteria, is it possible to add the overall score to each video entry as a sortable element in the database? I think it would be interesting and helpful to see what the judges liked vs. what internet voters liked. This would also help those of us who put A LOT of time into our ads, presumably, get to see them featured in a prominent fashion.
There are probably at least 30 runners-up that could have been contenders for the prizes/top slots. Even if you wish not to publicly indicate how the judges scored, perhaps you could forward the information to the individual filmmakers – that small degree of feedback would alleviate the soreness of losing the contest.
As many filmmakers did, I put a month of my life into my 30 seconds, and without any feedback I feel at a total loss for what I was doing with my time.
April 27th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Roger – Resend your blog post and photo to me at pkim -at- numenity dot org. I’ll make sure it gets posted.
April 27th, 2006 at 9:57 am
Paul,
it’s now clear that you’re reading these and avoiding answering the questions concerning how the submissions were dealt with in terms of the completeness and timing of the judging (and the seemingly linked isssue of posting). Presumably that is your answer.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Anonymous,
I agree with your statement. It is a real shame that these issues are not being addressed.
I would love to know that my ad was actually seen by the “esteemed” judges, but in reality, it seems obvious that their names were used as a draw to submit an ad while they actually did not view all submissions.
Everyone else’s comments only go to inforce this even more, and show that I am not the only one who feels this way.
I think that posting the judges scores for all 280 ads would be the only way to change my mind on this. After all the time and effort and hard work that people put into these commercials it seems the least that Firefox could do.
If Internet Explorer did not suck so much, I would switch back.
April 27th, 2006 at 11:15 am
The best discussion yet is taking place at: http://www.firefoxflicks.com/backstage/2006/04/24/ten-more-videos/
But as this post is entitled “Feedback”, I will post here.
It’s all very nice that there are many posts from Mozilla popping up reassuring us that the contest is running smoothly, but they avoid addressing some of the other concerns here. That is the problem with this contest… lack of feedback, communication problems. Guest posts being ignored, some emails overlooked (or getting cold replies). True, there is a lot of work being done, but that means they must get more people to help out. Even thought submissions are mandatory, they have to take some responsibility for calling on us for entries.
@Filmmaker – Comments should NOT be removed. They just must be rethought. You might just as well get rid of the voting as well. The votes mean even less than the comments, because even thought half of them are fake, you can tell which ones weren’t. And how nice is it to only let the “best” batch of entries reach viewers to not “devalue the brand”. They have already shown inability to choose quality with the winners, and a lot of what is posted is, quite frankly, an embarrassment. I find it hard to believe that that is the so called creme de la creme of the submissions. So, can we stop with all the suck-up comments such as, “Very inspiring, great submissions, love what everyone’s created.”? Not fooling anyone who actually watched them. If you said you like “some”, then that’s a different story.
And I think our negative feedback should be considered as well as our positive. So far it only looks like you would like the latter (we all would like to, but you should be more open minded with your mistakes).
DISCLAIMER – Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking every video posted or trying to be negative on purpose. I’ve got nothing against low budget. I’m concerned with Mozilla featuring ads that obviously are, well, shall we say, far less than enjoyable, before the work of those who actually tried.
Also, like James Lee stated in a comment in the above link, I have nothing against losing… it’s seeing the bad content get the medal that gets up my nose. Give the awards to good creative works and I wouldn’t say a word.
April 27th, 2006 at 11:46 am
I can only assume that “filmmaker” made one of the really, really good videos that we all love and not one of the subpar ones. I have to wonder though how he/she knows how good/bad the remaining films are. If all the films online were great, that’d be one thing, but the bar is pretty low. Statistically, “filmmaker” probably made a weak flick and had the luck of the draw, not anything more. The numbers show that less and less people are watching the remaining flicks which is a glowing example of a major web-community-building “DON’T” – don’t invite submissions and then let them disappear into thin air.
What’s the community-building logic here? A few people worked really hard to make free commercials for a company that (like Apple and Microsoft) gives away a free browser. They’re being told that “this is just the beginning” as everyone’s leaving. I mean, it’s nice that a couple of people are staying for the end credits, but no matter what anyone says – the show is clearly over. You’ve got to feel bad for whoever made video #280 – I wonder how much positive word of mouth he has for Firefox.
April 27th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
This is as close as I’ll get my ‘less than’ video to the homepage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPZ31ufCYdo
April 27th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Right, what I’m saying is that Firefox or the judges or someone should pick the top 10-20 and then just push those. Not sure which would make the cut, but it doesn’t really matter at this point, I think it would be better for Firefox and the random folks who visit the site who have nothing to do with the contest. Nobody is watching now because there’s too many, it’s overwhealming and the quality of the posted videos keeps going down. What do people have to pick one over the other to watch? The title? The thumbnail picture?
Also, I see this contest as kind of a film festival. Just because you worked really hard on your movie for free doesn’t mean the festival has to pick your submission to screen. Typically, a large film festival screens about 5-10% of the entries. And you have to PAY to enter. Be grateful this is free and if you don’t like the submissions the screening committee picks, just don’t enter next time. Every filmmaker I know has submitted to a festival, gotten rejected and thought the selected films were terrible. You shrug it off, move on and keep making stuff. That’s the game.
April 27th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Yeah, except these are commercials, bro – not films. And they’ve already posted more than 10-20. Which one did you make?
April 27th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
quote Filmmaker
And you have to PAY to enter. Be grateful this is free and if you don’t like the submissions the screening committee picks, just don’t enter next time. Every filmmaker I know has submitted to a festival, gotten rejected and thought the selected films were terrible. You shrug it off, move on and keep making stuff. That’s the game.
/quote
I’m not sure why would I have to be grateful?
I’m not a filmmaker. Not even close. But then again, this is not a Film festival. I understood it as a community project, lets have some fun and make some videos while we’re at it (or vice versa :) ) I would never submit my entry to any film festival, because i know my work is not up to the quality level of even the worst professional out there. But that’s why i have chosen to submit my idea here. As in: well, here’s what i came up with, how’s that? Am I dissapointed that my work hasn’t been seen – sure, but it’s not like i need prozac because of it. But that I should be GRATEFUL to FF for alowing me to so something on my free time – NOT.
I think this contest has, in the minds of lot of contestans, been redefined to a movie festival. Maybe this is normal to happen if you had really high hopes for your entry. I don’t know. After seing movie like “This is hot” i knew i had absolutely no chance of comming even close.
Let’s just have a beer/wine/juice/water and relax a bit. If you entered this as a professional, you should know how to accept defeat. If you entered for fun, just keep having fun. I know i am. Right now i’m amusing myself in seeeing when my work will finally, if ever, be posted.
I decided to blame all the problems ot the: us (the community) surprized the Flicks team with number of submissions so they couldn’t cope with it. hehehe…
Community 1:0 Flicks Team
Now make another contest and we’ll beat you again :P
Cheers all, I’m off to refresh the page to see if my flick got posted (a man’s gotta dream).
April 27th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Sorry for hijacking the thread but, no other place to go for this…
quote # bhaze
This is as close as I’ll get my ‘less than’ video to the homepage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPZ31ufCYdo
/quote
hehehe, it made me laugh. i like the joke. funny stuff…not profesionally funny(see post above) but still very funny.