Firefox Flicks Backstage

SAN FRANCISCO – April 27, 2006 – Mozilla today announced the winners of its Firefox Flicks video contest at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The winning videos were selected from nearly 300 submissions created by Firefox enthusiasts from around the world, who responded to the opportunity to help promote Firefox through short film.

The grand prize winner, “Daredevil,” will be short-listed for the NY Festival of Advertising’s 2006 International Advertising Awards in May, and the finalists’ Firefox videos will be incorporated into Mozilla’s 2006 marketing activities. The contest and today’s announcement of the winners wrap up the initial launch of the Firefox Flicks campaign, which will continue throughout 2006.

The winning submissions are:

Grand Prize
“Daredevil” by Pete Macomber
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=19326

Second Place
“Wheee!” by Jeff Gill
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=19542

Third Place
“Fox Fever” by Andrew N. Green
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=21146

Honorable Mention
“This is Hot” by Danny Robashkin
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=20674

Honorable Mention
“Give Me the Soap” by Chris Wedding
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=19836

“Daredevil” was directed by Pete Macomber, who creates music videos, commercials and screenplays from his Venice, Ca. home when he is not out chasing waves. With “Daredevil,” Macomber captures, in documentary-style, the youthful energy and approach to life of a girl whose “other browser is a surfboard.”

“The coolest thing about the Firefox Flicks contest is that everyone wins,” Macomber said. “Aspiring directors showcased their skills before a wide audience, inspired by a revolutionary organization, and now Mozilla has more than 250 sweet spots for Firefox.”

Accomplished entertainment and advertising judges — including the talents behind Charlie’s Angels, American Pie, and Six Feet Under — had the difficult job of selecting the winners. Mozilla announced the winners following a screening of selected Firefox Flicks and a panel discussion on the emergence of community-powered video on the Web, which included speakers from Butler, Shine & Stern, Creative Commons, Current TV, and Revver.

“The response to Firefox Flicks has been fantastic with entries from as far away as Australia, but the unifying theme has been passion,” said Asa Dotzler, Mozilla community coordinator. “This contest provided a unique way for our community to become a part of the Mozilla project. We thank everyone who participated for helping us launch the ongoing Firefox Flicks campaign with such a big bang.”

“The energy and enthusiasm of our community continues to inspire us as we roll out grassroots marketing campaigns to bring Firefox, and the better Web experience it delivers, to people everywhere,” said Mozilla’s Vice President, Marketing, Christopher Beard.

In November 2004, Spread Firefox volunteers designed and underwrote a two-page ad in the New York Times to announce the release of Firefox 1.0. The New York Times campaign kicked off Mozilla’s unique approach to grassroots marketing. Today, tens of millions of people worldwide are enjoying the better Web experience offered by Firefox. This year, the community has raised the bar with Firefox Flicks, the first large-scale community-produced video campaign for a software product.

To view the Firefox Flicks videos, visit: http://www.firefoxflicks.com

Firefox is available as a free download at: http://www.getfirefox.com or through the Mozilla Store at http://www.mozillastore.com.

About Mozilla Corporation

Mozilla Corp. is charged with the development and deployment of Mozilla technologies and products around the globe. The corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and continues to further the mission of the Mozilla project to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet. For more information about Mozilla, please visit: www.mozilla.com.

Contacts

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

Tomorrow afternoon, at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, we’re having a Firefox Flicks celebration event. The afternoon will include a great panel discussion covering topics from user-generated content to interactive and viral marketing, a screening of top Flicks, and the Firefox Flicks awards ceremony.

If you’re in the area and would like to attend, please email our event coordinator, Debbie Litle and we’ll get you added to the list.

There are ten new videos posted to the site today, and as Blake noted in an earlier post, we’ve also shifted the order some so that newer videos are featured somewhat more heavily on the Flicks video listing page. We’ve also increased the number of videos on each page and added more prominent navigation to encourage people to explore more than just the first page of videos.

Check out the latest videos, and don’t forget to share your praise or (constructive) criticism.

Hi, this is Sam Erb from Erbbysam Productions. Erbbysam Productions is a very small startup website that I created about 3 years ago because I made a bunch of games in basic and on calculators. Recently I’ve became very interested in video production and CGI. This is the first time that I’ve had a chance to use CGI in something besides a “tech demo.’ If you really must know, yes I am 16 years old and am actively looking for colleges (CSE or film) so I thought that this would be a great chance to do something that would reach a lot of people. I had my father submit the video and everybody who participate in this commercial (including me) and their parents signed release waivers to him.

This was a very big learning experience for me because I’ve really only used Maya 6.5 (a 3d modeling program) before to create very simple animations or explosions. I modeled the planes using curves and then patched together using nurbs. Around the time that I was finished I released that I had no idea how to properly texture the planes so I converted everything to polygons so that I could use the UV polygon texture editor in Maya and clean them up. All of the textures were created and then applied to the various parts of each plane so that each plane was its own individual group.

Every scene had to be set up uniquely to get the lighting right and because they all had to be set up along the z-axis to get the particles to flow correctly. Each frame in Maya took between 1 and 10 minutes to create. Every scene was shot with a green or blue (or pink in a few cases where blue and green were major colors in the scene) background to put in the background later.

The pirate scene was shot on a blue screen that one of my friends, Adam Verreault, has painted on a wall in his basement with him as the actor. The voiceover was done by Sutton Dewey and Mike Hendrix who, in my opinion, have some of the most “commercial” voices in my school.

The background scenes were scripted in Terragen and took over 10 min. a frame so there were many nights of rendering. All of the post production was done using Adobe Premiere.

You can see the video on youtube and see full sized screenshots here on my website.

-Sam