Steve Garfield has been named “the godfather of video blogging” as he’s been creating this type of content before the term vlog was even invented. Steve has learned a lot throughout his online video journey, and recently released the book Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business.

The book includes valuable information and resources such as: choosing a camera, lighting and sound, making videos without a camera (say what?!), recording and shooting, editing, uploading, broadcasting live, the art of video blogging, interesting interviews, and other golden tidbits of knowledge to make your videos the best they can be.

Since the book has been blessed by so many video creators and other individuals within the video production industry, I thought it would be a good idea to give away books to our Spidvid production community. So if you have wanted Steve’s book but are too cheap to buy a copy, or if you just learned about the book right now, here is the perfect opportunity to get a copy on us.

So here’s what you need to do to get your very own copy of Get Seen

1. Get a free Spidvid account and create a profile.

2. Either post a project and form a collaborative production team, or bid on a project and join a team.

3. Create a unique and entertaining video or short film with your team, and upload it via our platform.

Each team member who participates will get a free complimentary copy of Get Seen mailed to them directly. You have until Sunday July 11th (one month) to get your team’s project completed and video or film uploaded for distribution. So if you want a book it’s time to stop reading this post to assemble your team and get creating.

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There are video contest websites out there where creators and filmmakers create video ads for a brand, and the top winning entry (or three) receives a cash prize or in some cases a trip. In return the brand then owns the content and can use it for TV commercials, or however the company chooses.  This is all well and good for many, but not every video creator or filmmaker wants to produce content specifically for brands, especially if there are many ad restrictions on what is “brand safe” and acceptable.

What we are proposing to do is allow video creators and filmmakers to be totally creative, different, and remarkable to create a short piece of entertaining content to win one of three monthly or bi-monthly (every other month) prizes.

The Spidvid prizes will be for:

1. Most collaborative team – Our platform is all about promoting production teams who have talented members in locations from across the world. The ideal skill-sets and experience you need for your next project won’t necessarily be from individuals located in your local city. The team’s perfect editor may be based out of a location that’s thousands of miles away from where you are, so the goal is to connect with that individual to maximize the quality of the video or short film.

2. Most entertaining – As voted on by the viewing community. If there is a ratings tie we will create a poll and use a crowdsourcing strategy to determine the winner.

3. Most views – It’s all about the eyeballs baby.

For the first contest there will be no theme or limitations on what entertaining content can be created. Not sure of the prize amounts just yet but how it will work is every team leader will assign each team member a percentage of what they get for compensation. This is our how process currently works now so nothing really changes, and the team members still get to share the ad revenues and content ownership.

So if a team has 5 members and each individual has a 20% stake in the video, they would each get $60 if the cash prize was $300. They would then also share whatever revenues result from the distribution and monetization process. The prizes early on will be in the hundreds of dollars not in the thousands, so obviously we don’t expect individuals to devote dozens and dozens of hours to each video or film they are part of. It could even just be a group of friends who come together on a Saturday one weekend for the shoot, and then go into post production mode for the next couple days after.

There are some minor details to work out before starting the Spidvid prizes initiative, but outlined here are the main ones. Ideally we would love to have this video/film entertainment contest up and running for April 1st (and that’s no April fool), but May 1st is the more likely target date.

Would you like to create entertaining videos or films to compete for prizes? Let us know in the comment section below, or show your support on Twitter by sending us an @ reply, or write on our Facebook wall.

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