POM Tea Contest Results

The winners of the POM Tea Video Contest were announced last night around 9pm. I’m pleased to announce that Winston and I finished in 2nd place.

Thanks to everyone who voted for our video and for all the compliments we received. The whole experience was a lot of fun.

For finishing second, we will be awarded an 8 GB iPod Nano, some POM Tea coupons, and some “POM swag”. That’s a far cry from the $5180 Grand Prize (a MacBook Pro, $3000 cash, and 3 months worth of POM Tea), but we’re not complaining. The way we look at it, it’s a nice reward for the minimal amount of planning and one hour’s worth of filming we put into the video (though the editing did take considerably longer).

In my last post I mentioned that I thought our video was at least in the running to be a winner. I said this because POM contacted me a couple of weeks ago to say they “intend to show it in movie theaters”.

This is probably more exciting than the iPod. Last week I had to FedEx POM some release forms and a DVD with an uncompressed version of the video. Still not sure when and where it will be showing, but I hope to find that out soon.

I also can’t help but wonder how the winners were chosen (i.e., how much did votes matter versus what the people at POM thought best suited their image). I was a little surprised by which video won, though they certainly did a very good job. Another thing was that I used a pretty low-end DV camera, so I wonder if the quality of the video (part of the judging criteria) had an impact. The actual video doesn’t look as bad as the version on YouTube, but you can easily tell the winners used better equipment (a Canon GL2 for their camera).
Photo by Darwin Bell