The BPM Winners!

We had an amazing time at the Red Bull Moontower party this SXSW, and nothing was better than kicking off the whole shebang with the BPM: Beats Per Minute Frenzy awards ceremony. After a special Quote-Along screening of DAZED & CONFUSED, Wiley Wiggins, the star who plays freshman Mitch Taylor in the film, came out from behind the screen and announced his picks for the winners. The final choice was all his, and so he distributed the prizes like this:

In third place, and receiving a beautiful Gibson guitar: Wet Gold by Potato Media.

In second place, and receiving an AMD-powered Dell laptop: I Wanna Have Your Baby by Dial Z For Zombie.

And in first place, receiving an AMD-powered Dell laptop loaded with Gibson music software: Moon Boil by Team Bullet Time.

Congratulations to all the winners, and we hope to see each of you back again for the SON OF RAMBOW Filmmaking Frenzy, currently ongoing!

BPM Finalists announced

The online votes and in-theater votes have been tabulated and we have announced the finalists in the BPM Music video contest. The top 12 teams are as follows (in alphabetical order):

Bear Food, Team Facelift: Dippin' Chicken
B-Team, Vehicular: Radioactive
Bullet Time, Vehicular: Electric Eel
Bullet Time, Octopus Project: Moon Boil
Dial "Z" for Zombie, Team Facelift: I Wanna Have Your Baby
FOGAR, The Black and White Years; Power To Change
Foxtrot, The Octopus Project: Wet Gold
LichtenNight, Team Facelift: I Want To Have Your Baby
Potato Media, The Octopus Project: Wet Gold
Supercontinent, Z-Trip: Mass Hysteria
Take Me to your Leader, Lions: Evil Eye
U Sock, The Shackletons: Tremble

Wiley Wiggins, star of Dazed and Confused, will be reviewing the top 12 videos and deciding on the 3rd, 2nd and 1st place teams. The winners will be announced and the awards presented on Wednesday, March 12 at 9:30 PM at the Red Bull Moon Tower party. All teams should have received their passes to the Moon Tower. If for some reason, your team did not, please email us. Filmmaker passes are good for all four days of the Red Bull Moon Tower.

If you visit the BPM contest on Filmmakingfrenzy.com, check out the 12 finalists there. Also, the "competition mode" has been lifted and all scores are now visible to the public. We will be updating this blog tomorrow with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place teams.

Son of Rambow competition now open!

Hey gang, we are very happy to announce our latest Filmmaking Frenzy competition. We've partnered with Paramount Vantage for a competition celebrating the spirit of one of our most anticipated movies of the year, Son of Rambow.

About the Contest:
Submit your own original short film about anything. Literally, anything! Be creative and have fun with it. The folks over at Hammer and Tongs will be judging the videos and the winning submission will have their short film placed in the Special Features section of the Son of Rambow DVD. See the complete rules and register for this Frenzy here.

About the Film:
A runaway audience smash at the Sundance Film Festival, SON OF RAMBOW is a hilariously fresh and visually inventive take on friendship, family, film heroes and the death-defying adventures of growing up in the video age. It all begins in 1980s Britain, when young Will Proudfoot, raised in isolation among The Brethren, a puritanical religious sect in which music and TV are strictly forbidden, encounters something beyond his wildest fantasies: a pirated copy of RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD. His virgin viewing of the iconic thriller blows his mind – and rapidly expanding imagination – wide open. Now, Will sets out to join forces with the seemingly diabolical school bully, Lee Carter, to make their own action epic, devising wildly creative, on-the-fly stunts, not to mention equally elaborate schemes for creating a movie of total commitment and non-stop thrills while hiding out from The Brethren. But when school popularity finally descends on Will and Lee in the form of, oui, the super-cool French exchange student, Didier Revol, their remarkable new friendship and precious film are pushed, quite literally, to the breaking point . . . Filmed in a creatively mad-cap, homemade style with a mostly amateur cast and a wry, comic-tinged nostalgia, creative visionaries Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, AKA Hammer & Tongs (HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY), manage to capture both the agony and the giddy ecstasy of a camcorder childhood with humor, poignancy and a rousing dose of cinematic panache. Son of Rambow opens in theaters on May 2.

Update for BPM Competitors!

I wanted to give all the filmmakers an update on all things BPM. We've already uploaded a number of the videos will be putting the remainder of the films up after the 12:00 noon deadline on Monday.

The screenings at the Alamo
Since the videos are all relatively short, we were able to fit all of the films into one program, which we will be playing twice, Monday, Mar 3 at 7:30 PM and Tuesday, Mar 4 at 10:00 PM. To be clear, this is the same program, and we are running it twice. You will be able to vote for all of the films at the public screenings and these votes do count in determining the finalists in the contest, so tell your friends and supporters to come out and check out these shows! We'll also be giving away a pair of 4 day passes to the Red Bull Moon Tower at each of the screenings, and if you know anything about Red Bull, this will be THE party of the 2008 SXSW season.

The voting
A note about the voting. We use a complex algorithm that calculates the top ranked films. It takes into account proper voting, so if you and your supporters are voting your video very high and all the other videos very low, your voting will not carry as much weight as a someone who is voting a lot and voting appropriately. So - vote fair and tell your friends to either come out to one of the public screenings or go to filmmakingfrenzy.com and cast a vote for as many films as possible!

The Next Frenzy
I know you are all probably tuckered out from the weekend of filming, but we have posted our next competition: Paramount Vantage presents: The Son of Rambow short film competition. Check www.filmmakingfrenzy for details. Films should be inspired by Son of Rambow and the winning film will be chosen by the filmmakers themselves and will be included as an extra on all Son of Rambow DVDs. This is one of my favorite films of the year, it comes out in theaters on May 2.

Late Films
If your team worked on BPM but didn't finish their video in time, they are welcome to either bring the video to one of the public screenings or go ahead and upload to filmmakingfrenzy.com. The video won't be eligible for prizes if it was turned in late, but you can still post it up on the site to get ranked and rated by the filmmaking frenzy community. The late films will also be screened at the Red Bull Moon Tower, and if you ask nicely, we might still be able to score you some passes.

Thanks again everyone for taking part in the contest. We hope you had a good time, and we'll see you soon, hopefully either at the Ritz or the Moon Tower!