Pete Macomber, a Venice-based aspiring director of commercial spots and music videos, has won the grand prize in the Firefox Flicks video contest sponsored by Mozilla Corp., the developer and distributor of the Firefox Internet browser. Macomber, 33, has been creating a portfolio of 30-second commercial spots, music videos and similar works at his Venice, California studio for about five years now. His work can be accessed through petemack.com.
The contest called upon video creators to produce a 30-second advertising spot for the Firefox browser. Winning videos, selected from nearly 300 submissions from around the world, were announced at the San Francisco Film Festival last month. Macomber’s grand prize winner, “Daredevil,” captures, in documentary-style, “the youthful energy and approach to life of a girl whose ‘other browser is a surfboard,’” as described by Mozilla. The video has now been short-listed for the NY Festival of Advertising’s 2006 International Advertising Awards scheduled for September.
Mr. Macomber told the Mirror that winning the award has attracted attention to his work, including meetings with production houses that do commercials, that he believes he would not otherwise have gotten. He intends to put the $5,000 prize that comes with the award back into his business endeavors. The contest presented “an opportunity to get my stuff out there,” he said. His “stuff” was seen by a judging panel that included Hollywood producers, ad executives and directors, and is now being seen by many more at www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=19326.
“The response to Firefox Flicks has been fantastic with entries from as far away as Australia, but the unifying theme has been passion,” said Asa Dotzler, Mozilla community coordinator. Indeed, Macomber is a dedicated user of the Firefox browser, and he comes across as a believer as well as a user. “It’s a grass roots company,” he says, and that appeals to his grass roots approach to filmmaking.
