Last year my brother Joe and I decided to enter the 2020 Sony Vlog Challenge.
It’s a competition run by a camera giant and they had some nice cameras on offer as prizes.
I’m not generally one to get excited by the prospect of a competition but I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to tell stories and have them consumed by new audiences.
So I got out my notebook and scribbled some thoughts down that related to the chosen theme of ‘what who where’ and thereafter pumped out the following video.
At the time of writing it still had well under 200 views and I did not win any of the prizes on offer.
This year the vlog was announced again — this year the theme was ‘enter my world’ — and Joe asked me if I planned to enter.
“Yes,” I told him before losing track of the deadline and getting sidetracked after amassing 1000 subscribers.
I made a mad scramble at the end and took advantage of the novelty-sized globe that sits on top of a nearby mountain (hill?) to visually play with the concept of ‘my world’.
I made the deadline and again forgot all about the competition until I got a message from Sony asking me to send them my raw video file, thumbnail and all kinds of other bits of information. They said I’d been short-listed.
Now my eyes were well and truly on the prize. “I’ve practically won,” I thought to myself. “How am I going to use this particular camera?”
The announcement was due yesterday and I must have refreshed the Sony Vlog Camera Instagram account dozens of times, hoping to see my name/handle.
Then, just before 5 pm, the post I’d been waiting for appeared.
I scanned through the Instagram handles in the post. No, my name wasn’t there. Dammit! I scanned again, just to be sure! No, it wasn’t there.
Oh well. Maybe next year.
I clicked on the link-in-bio hyperlink and scrolled through the winners’ videos.
Then I saw the thumbnail for my video. I saw my name.
Hold on a second!
I went back to the Instagram post. All the handles in the post belonged to the competition judges.
So, I won! I can now introduce myself as an award-winning vlogger… At 43 that’s going to do a better job of shaving a few years off than any impulse-purchase sports car would.
Of course, I’m looking forward to getting a new camera that’s purpose-built for vlogging, but the glory associated with this win will hopefully open some journalistic doors for me too.
Here’s my prize-winning vlog.
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