Veidt Watchmen Advertising Contest :30 ad - Veidt Sport

Hey everyone,

I don't email huge groups of people at a time usually, but I wanted to share a story/some work with everyone.

Recently, a contest was started by Warner Bros for the new Watchmen movie (based on the comic book by Alan Moore - guy who also wrote From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, amongst others) that will be coming out next year. The contest was to make a commercial, highlighting a fake product by "Veidt Enterprises" (Adrien Veidt is the alter ego of Ozymandias, in the book.) (www.youtube.com/watchmenmovie) Bryan and I chose to make a commercial about their shoe, under the title, "Veidt Sport".

The timeline was severe - they only gave us from April 22nd to June 2nd, 11:59 pm Eastern time. Not a lot of days. However, Bryan and I took on the challenge, coming up with a concept and even challenging ourselves to animate the ad, in flash. I asked my coworker, Bruce, to do sound - and as always, we were down to the wire. We were feverishly spending all our free time working on this thing, outside of our full time jobs.

The ad was due at 11:59 EST - 8:59 for us west-coast-ers. I frantically tried to upload the ad at 8:30pm, and youtube kept spinning its' wheels. After 15 minutes of this, it gave me an error message. I nervously tried to upload it again...and it posted at 9:02pm. Unfortunately, to "submit" the ad, I had to be able to select it from my group of youtube videos, through the Watchmen youtube page (for an "official" submission), which added an extra step. Since my ad was "processing" (i.e. encoding, whatever's going on over at youtube), I could not select my ad, to submit it. Reloading the page over and over again for half an hour, I finally was able to submit it. However, the last step - a confirmation through email - led to our downfall. I got the confirmation email, clicked on the link - which led me to a blank web page with only this on the page:

:(

Yes. A sad face. Which was what was reflected in my face. Along with a lot of other facial expressions, I'm sure.

In any case, this is where the story goes from me to you. I really believe in our ad - it is one of the best things I've worked on, I feel. All the reaction I've been getting from people is positive. So, if you could take a moment to check out the ad, (It's only 30 seconds long!) rate it, and pass this along to other people to check out - I want to at least get some attention to this ad to get these contest guys to understand our plight, and at least get it seen and judged like all the other ads.

Without further ado, here's the link to the ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjGCStiBwLM

Please, send the link and this email along, and you'd be doing me a huge favor. Please, comment on it, good or bad.
Thanks in advance!