YouTube and Vancouver Film School Scholarship Contest

VFS and YouTube have just announced an international scholarship competition that should knock Chris Crocker off the front page and into the obscurity which has hungered for him ever since the Leave Britney Alone fifteen minutes started.

The prize is a full tuition scholarship to internationally-respected Vancouver Film School, the school out of which Kevin Smith dropped to go on to produce the magnum opus, the veritable Big Chill of his generation, Clerks. Like I ever saw that.

I’m old, yo.

Anyhoo. The challenge is to make a compelling YouTube pitch explaining just exactly why you’re the natural choice to win. Anyone with enough self-confidence to go into film should have no problem with this part. The school picks the finalists, and then the viewers on YouTube make the final choice.

Official Rules

Full Press Release (PDF)

A few more details, from the FAQ:

This competition is about making film school accessible to everyone. The YouTube community will award three aspiring artists (that includes directors, animators, actors, sound designers and more) with full-tuition scholarships to the Vancouver Film School program of their choice.

Between March 18th and May 9th, submit a short film, animation or creative pitch addressing the theme “What Matters to You.” You must start your video by identifying the VFS program you wish to attend and you must limit your video to no more than three minutes. On May 20th, we will announce the 10 finalists, selected by Vancouver Film School.

From May 20th to May 27th, the YouTube community will view and vote for their favorite videos.

On May 30th, we will announce the 3 scholarship winners.

What programs are up for scholarship awards?

1. Foundation Visual Art & Design
2. Acting Essentials
3. 3D Animation & Visual Effects
4. Classical Animation
5. Digital Character Animation
6. Houdini™ Certification
7. Acting for Film & Television
8. Digital Design
9. Entertainment Business Management
10. Film Production
11. Game Design
12. Makeup Design for Film & Television
13. Sound Design for Visual Media
14. Writing for Film & Television

Some handy tips:

Be creative. Don’t just tell us what’s important to you – show us. For example, if you’re a director, make a short film or documentary about an issue you care about. If you’re an animator, animate a story about an issue, person, place, etc. that matters to you. If you’re a writer, pitch a fresh screenplay concept about something that matters to you. If you’re a makeup artist, transform a stranger into someone who matters to you. These are just ideas and we know you can do better, but the point is: think creatively!

What gets into the shortlist?

Vancouver Film School will judge submissions based on the following criteria:

a. Creativity and Originality (up to 25 points)
b. Relevance of the video to the particular program of study selected (up to 25 points)
c. Technical Execution: Camera/Sound/Lighting/Editing (up to 25 points)
d. Overall Impression (up to 25 points)

And after that, it’s all up to the community on YouTube, so start sucking up building relationships now!

Shebeen Club Meeting: Amy Tan’s Birthday Party February 19th

Amy TanShhhh, it’s a surprise!

What: The Shebeen Club Presents: Amy Tan’s Birthday Party

When: 7:30pm-9:00pm, Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Where: Upstairs at The Shebeen, behind The Irish Heather, 217 Carrall Street in Gastown

Why: to celebrate Amy Tan’s Birthday, duh!

Who: Contact lorraine.murphy AT gmail.com for more information

How(much)? $15 includes presentation, dinner of bangers and mash or vegetarian pasta, one celebratory beverage, and mingling.

Resurrecting the Old Skool Shebeen Club tradition of celebrating authors who are not actually present, we move up from our former practice of toasting dead celebrities and begin to celebrate the living! Amy Tan is deservedly one of the best-beloved authors on the contemporary fiction scene. February 19th is her birthday, so we have arranged a short presentation on her life and works and her (I’m sorry) don’t-quit-your-day-job rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. If anyone has a CD, you’re welcome to bring it!

7-7:30: meet and mingle
7:30-8: listen and learn
8-whenever: The Joy Luck Club Literary Lottery: good luck!

cross-posted to the Shebeen Club

quiz: what punctuation mark are you?

But…em dash or en dash? WHAT IS THE ANSWER????


You Are a Dash


Your life is fast paced and varied. You are realistic, down to earth, and very honest.
You’re often busy doing something interesting, and what you do changes quickly.Y ou have many facets to your personality, and you connect them together well.

You have a ton of interests. While some of them are a bit offbeat, they all tie together well.

You friends rely on you to bring novelty and excitement to their lives.

(And while you’re the most interesting person they know, they can’t help feeling like they don’t know you well.)

You excel in: Anything to do with money

You get along best with: the Exclamation Point

I found my dream job!

Funny Pictures

 

But before I get into that, let me tell you about raincoaster.

Not this one.

This one:

Username: raincoaster19 Jan 2008
Gender: Man Income: Please ask me Age: 55 Located in: Abbotsford, NA, Canada Title:
New register member of nudistfriends.com. – http://www.NudistFriends.com/

Just for the record and so there is no confusion, that is not me. Nor is the one in the Tiffany Pollard sex tape.

No, for realz.

Now, where was I? Ah, yes, pontificating about having found my dream job. Longtime raincoaster fans (at least, fans of THIS raincoaster, not those ones) will know that the liquor cabinet (okay, safe) at global HQ is not quite as full as it could be, owning to a tragic lack of prosperitousness; indeed, it could well be said that, most remarkable among my many in-and-of-themselves-remarkable talents is the ability to avoid so much as the very appearance of capitalizing on any of the other skills and abilities, let alone the actuality of theredoing.

Even my marvelous tits.

Consequently, I have pursued many strange and increasingly bizarre job opportunities. There was the time the Russian Mafia wanted to hire me to write high school essays to be sold online; it took quite a bit of doing, including the doing of threatening an EI officer with arrest, which is, frankly, something I do not generally restrain myself from when it is good and warranted, and, indeed, enjoy, to get the dadgum gummint to admit that I couldn’t be thrown off EI for refusing to accept an illegal job with the kneecappers from Moscow. There was Occupational Pursuit, the magazine for job hunters, which commissioned several months’s columns in advance of publication and then went belly-up before opening its doors. There was the Spiderwick resume, of which I am still justly proud and convinced that thing wouldn’t be DOA if they’d hired me. There was the pitch for an online Daily Prophet, complete with really-quite-amusing-and-pitch-perfect-if-I-do-say-so-myself columns from Snape and Hagrid which I note I have failed to post on this blog, an omission which shall soon be rectified for lo, they are very funny.

There was this.

But, at last, there was The Manolo. And he said unto me, go forth and post! Save the little chillens from the scourge of Crocs! And he saideth also unto moi, ayyyy, I tire of sifting through Britney’s crotch shots and we all know what your standards are like, so would you manifest thy superfantasticness and take this spiritual burden off my hands? and so it came to pass.

But it was not enough.

Soon, very soon, I shall be babysitting a blogging lab on behalf of the Fearless City project, although what I shall do if it happens to fall on the 21st of February I do not know, for verily it is completely unthinkable that I shall miss a tiki party, particularly one with a buffet. But it’s money, blog money, which is better than blood money if a few orders of magnitude less lucrative.

But, alas, today my very favoritest kind of client, the kind who is nice and friendly and dutiful and who thinks I am a genius and who always pays in cash, immediately, bailed fifteen minutes before the meeting. So there goes the budget for this week.

So, today I find a dream job posted. Really, truly: a dream job. God knows, I’m agnostic when it comes to riches, so they don’t factor into the equation here. But it’s an incredibly high-profile, paid, full-time blogging gig at a place where I’m already somewhat known (Denton was my first follower, although whether that’s good or bad is anyone’s guess) where I know about the management and staff, and it is a site that I adore. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, anyone taking this position is essentially stepping over the still-twitching corpse of Mark Lisanti, perhaps the best writer in the blogosphere. Maybe it was murder; maybe it was suicide. Maybe he’s following his dream and the Sanjaya tour bus to strip malls across the continent. Who knows?

why

But the net effect is, rather than slavering over my keyboard as I frantically surf through the blogs for writing samples of the very cleverest link roundup in the history of gossip blogs as I have done for so many other Gawker Media openings, I find myself wishing for a monstrously large bottle of Jack Daniels to drink down and then crawl inside and sob.

So, fuck that with a chainsaw.

I’m going for this job instead.

Job specs: work vampire hours, take no shit, bust balls, wear fabulous clothes, attack people inferior to me, then tie them up and ignore them and get paid $185 per hour plus tips. And since it looks like one of their staff will be away on hiatus for 5-15, it’s got a solid future.

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Blawg-o-sphere. Cube? Dodecahedron?

Moosehat

I’ve been asked to come up with a short list of some blogs I think are good. Given that I’m outrageously opinionated, this should not be difficult to do. Strangely, athough I normally avoid memes like the plague, this is one assignment I eagerly accepted, given that it contributes to my being on the tee vee. If you, also, can put me on tv, I am perfectly prepared to meme away on command… see how easy I am to get along with?

Some good blogs, and why (and if I left you off, it’s just because I’m saving you for myself, okay? You’re still in the blogroll, silly! No hurt emails plzthxkbai!):

My blogs, of course:

raincoaster
TeenyManolo
Ayyyy
runningthroughrain
The Shebeen Club

  • Defamer, the Hollywood gossip blog. Mark and Seth are probably the best writers in the blogosphere, and they cover a lot of ground, wittily. The commenters are gold.
  • PerezHilton, the #1 blog in the world. Why? He dishes up celebrity gossip nearly 24/7, and he has a compelling (love it or hate it) personality. Blogs without personal identities are completely DOA.
  • DarrenBarefoot, a Canadian abroad. He’s the best example I know of what Nancy White calls a Technology Steward: he isn’t a techie, but he can justify the ways of tech to the rest of the world, sifting through a billion flashes in the pan and pointing out the ones we need to bother with, the ones that will change our lives. Also: really funny.
  • RenalFailure, wild fabrications and outright lies. Hilarious, strange, creative, weird.
  • DamnInteresting just is. DAMN interesting.
  • AliEteraz, a modern Muslim: Islamic reform, Pakistani politics, and changing the world, one post at a time.
  • Jesus’General, the (satirical) home of the glorious conservative revolution.
  • ParaEthos, one of the best intellectual art ‘n philosophy sites out there. Disorienting, enriching, and bizarre.
  • PrettyGoodOnPaper, a highly literary blog that’s not a book blog. Intellectual, challenging, intriguing.
  • WalkingTurcotYards, a remarkable urban photography blog from Montreal’s Turcot Yards, the largest abandoned urban space in the world.
  • Fark. When all else fails and you think the world has turned dull grey, a quick Farking will set you right. The greatest roundup of the bizarre in the intertubes!

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