Make your own Watchmen Ads

I love this contest, a delicious twist on the YouTube favourites of make your own ad. This time it’s for the Watchmen movie, or rather, fictional products from Veidt that will appear in the Watchmen movie. Zack Snyder introduces the contest

In essence, you download the assets and make your ad for one of the fictional products. 40 winners will win a signed posters, 10 (as voted by you) will win a HD camera and up to 20 of Zack’s favourites will potentially be featured in the film, on one of the many TVs that apparently are heavily included. This looks a great opportunity to get something of yours in what could be a cult film.

Screenshot from competition site

Whatever you do though, read the rules, which have definitely been written by a whole bunch of entertainment lawyers. In addition to the usual restrictions of who can enter (ie no-one from the companies involved) the creator, or anyone in them, can’t be represented by an agent, have an acting contract, have a merchandising agreement or be a member of an union/guild that would have some restriction on the film being used. There are lots and lots of words about ideas and IP and not being able to sue the company if in the future they produce something similar but it looks like you still own your work, even through Warner Brothers can do what they want with it. Definitely one of the more complex set of rules I’ve read.