Apple's Insomnia Contest

I watched "Imagine" which was the short I was referring to earlier that had an actual helicopter in it.

The other day, I thought it was really cool. With a day to contemplate it, I'm thinking that the filmmaker to an incredibly irresponsible risk. In a real film, there's safety crews and trained professionals for that stunt.

It wouldn't surprise me if Apple prevented it from entering the top 25 on the basis that it might encourage other filmmakers to take such a risk (when they're low on sleep anyway)... legally they'd be looking out for their own best interests.

A good short, but there's a reason why this community doesn't use explosive squibs or glass shattering tools... It's dangerous without a certified professional.
 
I watched it too and it struck me as awfuly similar to a movie that one of the On The Lot contestants did. It was good, but like you said, clearly risky... even if the hellicoptor pilot was a trained professional, I'm sure the rest of the guys wern't.
 
Did you gys receive that letter last night from Apple? Apparently this is as good as the site is going to get...
It's going to be very interesting when the top 25 are announced...
Here it is if you didn't get it:

Hello Insomniacs!

Here's an update on the progress of the public rating period:

- We started the week by making significant enhancements to the web servers to accommodate the amazing traffic that all of your films have generated. The Insomnia Gallery is now running at 110% and performance should no longer be an issue.

- A few of you have had trouble registering friends and family who are visiting the gallery and want to rate your film. We recognize that requiring an Apple ID and registering separately for voting in the gallery isn't the fastest process. However, it's important to have both of these steps to ensure that ratings are calculated fairly.

- Some of you have asked to change the description or thumbnail of your film. Unfortunately, this information is not something that can be changed.

- We've received a few questions about why the current rating of a film isn't visible. At this time we don't have any plans to make ratings visible because we have found in the past that this encourages a substantial amount of cheating. We are able to detect cheating but it takes extra time to correctly re-adjust a films score. The score of a film is not just a sum of the ratings and is based on multiple factors which allows a film's rank to change quickly. This also means that the most watched film may not necessarily be the winning film. Ratings of more stars carry more weight for a film's overall score.

- Remember that public rating lasts for another 17 days so now is the time to campaign on behalf of your teams film!


Good luck!

-Insomnia Team
http://www.apple.com/go/insomnia/
 
Apple very uninteligently sent out a Facebook application that shows the top 4 entries. Why they did this, I have no idea. It only serves to give more recognition to entries that clearly already have more than enough, while at the same time letting more and more of the "undiscovered gems" remain just that, undiscovered.

I didn't care for the #1 entry. And of course the helicopter one was going to get up on the top, regardless of it's originality. I saw Poddicts on the first day of the festival and said to myself "Oh, I sure hope these entries get better than this." Finally, the #4 entry evokes some nice feelings and was shot well, but again, there's really no PLOT. That's my take on the top 4 anyway.
 
in real life, if you design a polling system that skews the results by as little as 1%, you are fired. Apple is skewing the contest with this facebook garbage 10,000%. Those top 4 entries are getting infinitely more attention than everyone else's. This is by far the 2nd dumbest contest I've ever been a part of (the first was a peeps eat off, I won that but was later disqualified)

anyway since its all a popularity contest, look at my sig! come on click it!
 
DerrickTempleton said:
in real life, if you design a polling system that skews the results by as little as 1%, you are fired. Apple is skewing the contest with this facebook garbage 10,000%. Those top 4 entries are getting infinitely more attention than everyone else's. This is by far the 2nd dumbest contest I've ever been a part of (the first was a peeps eat off, I won that but was later disqualified)

anyway since its all a popularity contest, look at my sig! come on click it!
Click to expand...

Why were you disqualified from the peeps?

:laugh:
 
That's awful. And I was not impressed with the leaders. The podcast addict one dragged on and on. A cute joke, spread out way too long. I like Tim Morgan's film better than those to be honest. I imagine he didn't make the Facebook list...
 
I agree, why put a statement on the site saying you won't reveal public ratings and then go ahead and do it to gain more popularity on facebook? This contest is ridiculous. Those films are the only ones people will watch now. Imagine was pretty popular anyway, so I expected it to be there. The only other decent one on the top four is Nowhere in Particular, but it doesn't have a big message to it. I'll be surprised at what the top 25 brings, it sucks that only those will get judged but I can see why.

Check out my entry if you like: "Trip"
http://edcommunity.apple.com/insomnia_fall07/item.php?itemID=322

Any constructive feedback is appreciated.
 
Had I entered this festival with my entry last year, I would have a contender. However, the competition is really rough this year, and I've been outdone.

That being said, I'm not terribly upset that Apple created a Facebook application. It does, however, exemplify Apple's lack of foresight from the beginning. Here's how they see it: They get free advertising and the Festival gets more traffic. To them, it's a win/win.

What's infuriating for some of you other guys who have visceral entries and a decent story to tell is the fact that the thought clearly never crossed Apple's collective minds that additional traffic would be channeled directly to the entries that were already in the lead.

What incentive do I, the notorious Facebook browser, have to look at more than the four leading entries when only two of them win?
 
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that mine doesn't stand a cance at this point either. What will be the most interesintg to find out are the remaining top 21 entries. At least of those, there's a legitmate judging process. Personally, I don't think those top 4 are anything substantial, and I hope there at least one really good video that wins that part of the competition...
 
bballplaya283 said:
Why were you disqualified from the peeps?

:laugh:
Click to expand...

so the contest was how many peeps can you fit in your mouth without throwing up or swallowing any of them. At 14 peeps, I was the last man standing. They declared me the winner. At that point, I spit them out. Then all of a sudden some guy came out of the crowd and stuffed 15 in his mouth and they took the trophy from me and gave it to him!

Even more devastating than that was the time when I completed the 1 player campaign on POG's official website (pog.funrise.com), and was awarded my digital diploma of POG mastery. I got to enter my name in it and save it as an adobe acrobat. I saved the file on my desktop and was gonna print it out later. Then I went to open the file and my name had been erased, it was a blank! Pog revoked my diploma!
 
DerrickTempleton said:
so the contest was how many peeps can you fit in your mouth without throwing up or swallowing any of them. At 14 peeps, I was the last man standing. They declared me the winner. At that point, I spit them out. Then all of a sudden some guy came out of the crowd and stuffed 15 in his mouth and they took the trophy from me and gave it to him!
Click to expand...

I would have been furious. I'm sure the people on stage or whatever had to each go 1-by-1, causing the overall time to be much longer.

The alternate of that game, as many of you know, is called "chubby bunny".

You put as many marshmallows into your mouth and keep going until you cannot clearly say "chubby bunny". A kid died at a camp I used to go to playing that...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top