Words of Wisdom Contest

The Words of Wisdom Contest was a brickfilming contest hosted by Joshua Leasure in 2003. The aim of the contest was to make a brickfilm depicting a well known piece of advice. It was the third official Brickfilms.com contest and was the first to be organised by Leasure, who purchased the website from Jason Rowoldt in 2003. It was preceded by the Historical Fiction Contest and followed by the A Peculiar Event Contest.

History
After purchasing Brickfilms.com from Jason Rowoldt in June 2003, Joshua Leasure worked on an overhaul of the website and launched the new-look Brickfilms on August 4th. Ten days later on August 14th, he announced the first official contest on the new site, the Words of Wisdom Contest. This contest was about creating a brickfilm depicting a famous wise proverb or quote in no longer than two minutes, with a suggested length of around one minute. Leasure mentioned that the theme was partially inspired by the films of Ben Brenn, particularly Ninja Thief, and that the short time limit was inspired by the relative success of the Informal Chicken Dance Contest, which received 14 entries versus the 10 and 12 entries received by the Classical Movie Contest and Historical Fiction Contest, respectively.

The contest's original deadline was Septemeber 15th 2003, but a server crash on the morning of that day led to a number of submissions not being successfully received. To allow these entrants time to resubmit, the deadline was pushed back one day to September 16th. The Words of Wisdom Contest received 33 entries; a remarkable increase over the previous contests held by the site.

Judging
The Words of Wisdom contest did not utilise a panel of judges but rather asked each entrant to submit a ballot ranking their top ten favourite films in the categories Best Theme and Best Presentation, with Best Theme counting more towards the final, overall score of each film. Any non-participating member who was a Patron 24fps or higher in the Brickfilms.com Patron system was also allowed submit a ballot. As the only film that entrants were not allowed vote for was their own, a rule was introduced that would deduct 10 points from any entrant who did not submit a ballot to prevent them from trying to give their own film a boost by withholding their vote. This left the user in last place, "WeirdEars", with a final score of -10 points. Ballots were received from 29 entrants and 7 additional patrons, leading to a total of 36 judges.

The Words of Wisdom Contest offered four prizes: LEGO set 9293 Community Workers for the winner of Best Overall, 1380 Werewolf Ambush for Runner-up Overall, 3405 Blue Team Bus for Best Theme, and 3403 Grandstand with Scoreboard for Best Presentation.

Winners
It was predicted that certain films may win multiple categories and was decided that in the event of this happening, the multi-winning film would only receive the award for one category and the award for the lesser-category would be awarded to the next film in line. When Zero Gravity Rebellion by James Maduzia received the most points for both Best Overall and Best Presentation, it was decided that Great Inventors Part 2 by Stefan van Zwam would be announced as the winner of Best Presentation. Additionally, when Words of Wisdom by Chris Salt won Best Theme while also being the runner-up overall, it was decided that Dare to be Different by Nick Maniatis would be announced as the winner of Runner-up Overall.

Listed here are the top three films in each category in order of points, with the entries rewarded the prizes highlighted.