NOW ACCEPTING VIDEO SUBMISSIONS - Official Guidelines

While up until now CheshireCatStudios has been focused on written reviews, and though it will still be a main attraction here, we want to expand into the realm of video content and podcasts, and will be accepting applications to become featured on our site.

Since we are now dabbling in creating and promoting new video series on CheshireCatStudios.com, it is the conclusion of the CheshireCatStudios.com staff and the fans that we write up some general guidelines on exactly what we are looking for in Video talent.



WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU
Why post your videos at CheshireCatStudios.com?

Site-wide: 10,000 UNIQUE VIEWS PER DAY; 300,000 UNIQUE VISITORS PER MONTH; AND GROWING

We can potentially finance advertising for your video series through the ad revenue we receive in an attempt to get you (and us) more viewers

We will feature your video on our homepage for thousands of people to see.

Our members and admins provide constructive feedback to help you make your video series the best it can be.

A growing membership of quality contributors in our forums who can provide feedback and help spread your work.

Search Engine Optimization helps to get your videos seen!

Email or PM LaughingMan or Zimes for more potential benefits!

WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS?
You keep your videos under your own YouTube/Blip.tv account.
You keep 100% of all of the ad revenue your videos make (blip.tv).
You keep total creative control of your series.
You don't pay us a dime.

All we ask is that CheshireCatStudios.com is mentioned at the end of the videos featured. It can be a simple "Special Thanks to www.cheshirecatstudios.com" or we can provide a brief bumper video that plays at the very end. That is our only real condition for featuring your videos on our site.




WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We have openings for original, entertaining series that are of acceptable quality but also have the potential to grow and become even better in time.

THREE KEY WORDS:
- Original: Something at least moderately fresh that sets you apart from everyone else on YouTube.
- Entertaining: It has to be something people will enjoy watching and can relate to on some level.
- Series: We need video series that show a constant theme from video to video.




HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR SERIES

Register in our forums, and submit your video tryouts in our forums under the VIDEOS topic: videos/

PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR INTENT IN THE TOPIC HEADER. Something like "Johnny's Movie Mash Video Submission" would work because you identify YOURSELF and your INTENT.

Videos MUST be viewable via a video streaming service (ie: YouTube, BlipTV, etc.) and MUST be playable without the need to A) download the video, or B) download codecs or software to play the video. We include tools that allow videos to be embedded into forum posts from BlipTV, GoogleVideo, and YouTube so this shouldn't be an issue. If you can't get the video to embed, simply drop a working link to the video.




APPROVAL PROCESS

CheshireCatStudios.com is a DEMOCRACY. We rule by majority vote for up to 1 week AFTER your submission has been posted. After 1 week, we will either welcome you aboard, or we will send you back with constructive criticisms if you wish to try again in the future.

A "NO" vote from us is NOT the end of the world, because we allow retries IF each retry shows noticeable improvements. If there is something extremely flawed with your video series that causes us to turn you down, and if it is not improved in subsequent submissions, we will have no choice but to give you a final "NO" at which further submissions will no longer be allowed without the express consent of LaughingMan, Zimes or Kenny Farino, and can potentially be considered SPAMMING, which can potentially result in the removal of your videos and/or links.

If you do not want to be featured in the main page and feel it would be a waste of your time to go through our approval process, feel free to post your videos in the forum, but we reserve the right to break any links, lock any thread, or IP ban any offender that we feel is abusing this privilege.




GUIDELINES ON HOW TO BE ACCEPTED TO CHESHIRECATSTUDIOS.COM
(IN ORDER)

1) BE ENTERTAINING If you conduct your video lifelessly and monotone to the point where we would rather watch the ceiling fan than your never-ending drivel, we will tell you to try again. You may think you are an untapped resource of knowledge in movies, games, or whatever, but if you play professor and the class (us) falls asleep, you hurt your chances. It's not to say that we don't like to think or learn, but PLEASE make your work interesting for OTHERS to watch.


2) DON'T FORCE HUMOR There is a thin path of greatness that runs between “boring” and “annoying”. If you go the opposite extreme of being too over-the-top and ‘animated’, it is also unacceptable. You will have better luck getting accepted if you are snarky and witty with your humor or if you do some visual comedy that isn't over the top and annoyingly gimmicky. We like to be entertained and we like all sorts of humor, but the kinds we do NOT like include annoying gimmicks, acting like a real-life Animaniac, shoving a weird joke on something that can’t be made funny, etc.


3) BE ORIGINAL Consider what sets your series apart from everyone else on YouTube. We are tired of the flood of every Tom, Dick, and Lucy making sub-par movie or game review videos. There are already hundreds of "angry nerds" and "critics" and "that <noun> with the <noun>s" on the web who review movies, games, and animation, but we want to be a promoter of more original ideas and video series. It won’t matter how technically superior your videos are to everybody else, you also need to have a great and original idea that makes you stand out from the crowd.


4) HAVE GOOD AUDIO/VIDEO No, you don't need to spend $999 on some absurdly priced studio-quality video/audio editor. But what you CAN do is just give attention to how your video LOOKS and SOUNDS. We’re not asking for Blu-Ray quality, but if we can't see crap in your video, or if the sound is impossible to make out, then we can't accept it. Another culprit is when audio balance is uneven and parts are extremely quiet, and then immediately another part will blow out an eardrum. Nothing pisses us off more than going partially deaf because you didn't level the volume on your video. ...Well, maybe the DON'T BE ANNOYING stuff in Guideline #2...


5) YOU PROBABLY HAVE AN EDITOR. USE IT! DON'T HAVE A SCRIPT? WRITE ONE. If you stumble and trip over every other word, or if you do a lot of frequent pausing because of screwups in recording, please remove them and recut the video so that it is a more pleasant experience for the listener. Nothing ismoreannoynnn aan a video that garblestheirstuff.... um.... er.... wait..... together and you cant say -I mean TELL, what they said... ARE SAYING..... sorry....

Also, scripts are NOT bad things. Unless you're a better improv artist than Johnny Carson (and that isn't likely) write a script. Write it on your PC, write it on your hand, write it on toilet paper, we don't care, just have your thoughts organized or you could be inadvertently hurting yourself.


6) LOOK PRESENTABLE If you wouldn't be caught dead looking a certain way in public with friends, family or a loved one, then for the love of God don't look that way in your videos. If your show involves you presenting yourself, as in YOU, in front of the camera for millions to see, then please look presentable. You may think that you look cool wearing your Vulcan ears while being covered in blue paint to look like a Na'vi and packing your +5 bastard sword of burninating, but 99% of the public thinks you look like a moron. Another example is if you look like you went camping for a month, in a cave, with no running water or soap, and were only armed with your collection of cartoon pornography. People don't need to see you looking like that. Neither do we.


7) PLAGIARISM WILL NOT BE TOLERATED Period. If you undeniably and intentionally rip off existing work, without making your content an acknowledged parody of that work, the content will be rejected and/or removed, and repeated offenses can result in a permanent ban.


8) YOU MUST BE OVER 18 We don't want to get tangled in any family dramas about kids being exploited or some dumb crap. We don't need to have the police knock on our doors because it's harder than hell to bake $100 bills into doughnuts.


9) DECLARE YOUR INTENTIONS WHEN SUBMITTING If you want to drop an app for video content (or any other content) please say so at the beginning of any forum posts you create. We would rather have traffic coming into the site rather than people coming in and saying "Look at my stuff over here!". That kind of crap can be considered spamming and it will get your links killed fast and could result in a possible IP Address ban if it is a repeated offense.


10) VIDEOS MUST BE IN ENGLISH We're unworldly heathens because we ask that videos be in English. Deal with it. If you speak fluent English with an accent, then we only require that you speak in a manner that can be understood.


11) NO EXCESSIVE USE OF COPYWRITTEN MATERIALS We won't allow RiffTrax videos (audio might be okay), unabridged series commentaries, re-dubs, or anything that is essentially a re-posting of a majority of the content of a movie or show. Besides, unless your name is "Mike", "Joel", "Tom Servo" or "CROOOOOOW" they're also normally very long and very boring.