She's A Winner! But You Already Knew That.

Yeah, yeah, so it's my birthday today.  Not what I want to talk about.

I know most of you already know from Facebook, but I don't care.

Gonna brag on The Daughter over here, too.

Walgreens was running a contest in Chicago and St. Louis for high school students to enter works of art for their "Expressions" contest.  On the day before the contest ended, The Daughter entered a stop motion animation project she'd been working on for weeks.

• She made the puppet.
• She made the background
• She shot the nearly 1,000 pictures herself.
• She made the stills into a video and added a song in the background.

We were so proud of the work she did, and it was awesome.

And then the people from Walgreens called on the day the contest was ending.  They loved the video, but…

• The video was 5 seconds too long.
• The song in the video was copyrighted, and unless she could get it cleared, she had to replace it or just remove the sound entirely.

This news came after she got home from school, and she had to resubmit it by midnight if she wanted to enter, but they REALLY wanted her to enter.

As she heard the clock loudly ticking, she cut the video down to size, removed the song, and removed the lip-syncing to the song.  Then, she found a website that let her mix her own soundtrack for it, and she put that in as the soundtrack for the video.

It's now 11:20, and she went to the website to submit it…

And it was closed!  Turned out, they were hosting the contest on servers in Philadelphia, and since it was after midnight there, they closed the contest.

So, she called the Walgreens lady who had called us.  She gave us an email address to send the video to, and we submitted it with little time to spare.

Then there was a round of public voting (thank you all who voted), where we saw the other 50 or so videos she was up against.

And yesterday, it was announced:  The Daughter won first place in the Chicago Multimedia category.

• She won $500 for her school.
• She won $500 for her teacher.
• She will be one of the guests of honor at an awards ceremony where they will present her with a check for $2,000.

Yesterday, she asked me if I was proud of her for winning.  "I'm HAPPY for you that you won.  I'm PROUD of the effort and dedication you put into it, especially when you had every reason to give up."

And here's a link to the ORIGINAL full video, song and all:

Yup, I'm proud of her.