LEGO Studios Movie Making Contest

The LEGO Studios Movie Making Contest was a brickfilming competition hosted by The LEGO Group to tie in with the launch of LEGO Studios. It began in late 2000, making it the earliest known brickfilming competition.

History
The contest was launched around November and December 2000, roughly coinciding with the launch of the LEGO Studios line. The deadline for submission was March 31, 2001. Entry forms were first distributed in shops. Entries were required to be submitted on VHS, CD-R/CD-RW or. The contest was open to residents of the US and Canada (excluding Quebec) aged between 8 and 18. More than 700 submissions were received.

Three semi-finalists were chosen in each of three age categories, 8-10, 11-13 and 14-18. These nine films were screened at the LEGO Studios Movie Making Award Ceremony, which took place in June 2001 in New York. Winners in each category were announced at this event. The three winners were then screened at the Backyard National Children's Film Festival in November 2001, where they were to compete for the LEGO Studios Global Movie Making Award against "finalists from the rest of the world". At least one other version of the contest is known to have taken place in the UK, though information on this is very scarce. It is not known if the Global Movie Making Award was ever actually presented.

Judging and prizes
Preliminary judging was handled by D.L. Blair, Inc. which selected 10 films in each age category. These films were then judged by LEGO Systems, Inc to determine the three semi-finalists in each category. The criteria used in these stages of the judging were original and imaginative story and presentation, weighted at 40%, technical execution (production, editing and audio), weighted at 30% and creative uses of LEGO elements, weighted at 30%.

Prizes were awarded to the winners of each age category. These included a trip to the Backyard National Children's Film Festival, where the winners would be screened, a tour of a major Hollywood film studio, an award constructed from LEGO bricks and the entire LEGO Studios 2001 product assortment. Additional prizes were to be awarded to the winners of the LEGO Studios Global Movie Making Award. These were a trip for four to a Hollywood movie premiere in 2002 and varying sums of money for each age category, $1000 for 8-10, $2000 for 11-13 and $5000 for 14-18.

Results
Listed here are the winners, along with the other semi-finalists in each age bracket.

There are also two known winners of the UK version of the contest: TBC News by Sam Roelich in the 14-18 age category, and Heavenly Balls by Ben Roper and Richard Seaman in the 11-13 age category. The list of contest films on the Studios site also mentions the films Recycling, The Final Tapir, and Shark Fin Soup Bites, and it is unknown who directed these films and what contest they placed in (presumably, one of these was a UK winner in the 8-10 age category).