TOTALLY AWESOME VIDEO GAMES Frenzy results are in!

The jury over at G4 TV was in charge of deciding finalists on this one, and the man himself Mr. Uwe Boll chose the ultimate winner last night at the Fantastic Fest Awards Ceremony!

And the ultimate winner was... MARIO PAINT! Congratulations go out to Team FilthyButt, and now we can all focus on stocking up on caffeine for the upcoming BLOODSHOTS weekend!

Fantastic Fest 2009 Bumper Results, Pt. 2!

Several people have written in to us concerned over the plan to announce the jury winners of the Fantastic Fest Bumper competition at the Awards Ceremony because they were very cocky, convinced that they were going to win, and wanted to be able to spend some of their Alamo prize money while they were in town for the festival. It just so happens that we kind of like cocky people, and we quickly realized that these concerns were completely valid, so we're going to go ahead and announce our jury prize winners now!

Jurors viewed ALL 58 of the 2009 Fantastic Fest Bumper videos, deliberated amongst themselves, and selected the following ten as their very favorites of the bunch. We were sticklers to the time limit for the grand prize, but for the jury-picked winners we went ahead and let them choose their absolute favorites, which was helpful since sooooo many entries were at least a couple of seconds over the time limit. Listed in alphabetic order by film title, the winners are:

The Dryad and the Centaur - electric sheep
Fantastic Attack - Take Mole to Your Leader (chicken)
Fantasutikki Kaiju - Rollerfeet.com
Garden Party Massacre - Baker's Dozen
Ice Cream!!! - Parallactic Pictures
Little Red Riding Hoodie - Comedia A Go-Go
Night of the Milk Beast - Scab Farm
The Number to Heaven -Yer Dead
The Weiner Dog Gang - The Weiner Dog Gang
Where's Your Mummy - BlueGogglesFilms

Each team will receive a $100 Alamo gift certificate to enjoy whatever they like throughout the festival.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and to everyone who's coming out to Fantastic Fest this year. We can't wait to hang out with you and watch your work up on the big screen! If you're one of the winners and you're coming by the festival, we'll have your gift card available through the Alamo managers. You'll need to have the team name and the email you used to sign up with, and they'll set you up. If you get confused at all, just find me somewhere in the theater or shoot me an email at henri (@) originalalamo.com and I'll find a time to come meet you.

The next Filmmaking Frenzy is BLOODSHOTS, our annual 48 hour horror filmmaking competition. Registration will be open for BLOODSHOTS on October 5, and our shooting weekend will begin on Friday, October 9 at 7pm and continue through Sunday, October 11 at 7pm. You can find information on that contest on our website right here.

Cheers,

Henri

Fantastic Fest 2009 Bumper Results, Pt. 1!

And the winner is... DOGZILLA vs CATHRA by Team FOGAR!

It was an extremely close call between DOGZILLA and Parallactic Pictures' ICE CREAM!!!, and ICE CREAM!!! definitely earned more straight up views than almost any video we've had in any contest ever. But when all was said and done the score of DOGZILLA managed to be soooooo close to ICE CREAM!!! (and, it just so happens, Scab Farms' NIGHT OF THE MILK BEAST), and FOGAR! was the one team in the top scoring category who managed to bring their video in under the 30 second time limit.

Typically we're all about quality over being sticklers for the rules, and when Parallactic Pictures told us that they couldn't cut their masterpiece below 42 seconds I told them to go ahead and upload it, but warned that if it came down to a close call between them and a video that came in under time, we'd go with the one that managed to follow all the rules and still wow the crowds. FOGAR! came in a little bit below ICE CREAM!!!, but it was something like .002 of a percentage point, so our team of judges made the call to award them the grand prize.

And because I've seen a few people posting comments with questions about how the voting works, here's how FOGAR! won this Frenzy:

This award for this contest is based on viewers' votes. It's not a popularity contest at all, but having five people give your movie 8 stars is worth more than having one person give your movie 10 stars. The idea there is that it's really easy to give yourself a high score, then not tell anyone else to see your movie and hope that your vote is the only one we ultimately count. That's not really a fair system, either.

Likewise, if 1,000 people watch your movie, but most of them score it as a 5 star movie or lower, your extra views aren't going to help your score at all.

The contest was extremely close on this one, and all three finalists (and many more) were obviously awesome bumper creators, and I wish I had enough VIP badges to go around to everyone. ICE CREAM!!! managed to be the most viewed, but apparently may have been hit by some late in the game backlash for seeming to pull ahead early on.

Of course, ALL of these bumpers will be played before various titles at Fantastic Fest, and there will still be a jury prize awarded to ten more movies after our Fantastic Fest juries have had a chance to check them all out. We'll be announcing those winners at the Awards Ceremony of the festival as well as online here and on the Fantastic Fest site. For now, congratulations go out to FOGAR! and everyone else who managed to complete something as challenging as getting children and monsters to hang out together. That hasn't been done since Fred Savage's monster made that one kid drink pee.