Digital Film Festival Official Rules

The following are the rules that will be used during the administration of the contest. Please contact the organizers if clarification is desired on any rule.

Submission Rules

1. All submissions must represent an original creation. Any submissions that are derived from the work of others (e.g., taken from a website) will be disqualified with no refund on the registration fee. The organizers are aware of several existing sources of example Alice programs and will check to ensure the originality of each submission. Also, participants from previous Alice Festival contests must submit new creations and may not resubmit the same entry used in a past contest. Participants of past Alice summer camps or classes are welcome to submit their projects as long as it has not been submitted to the festival previously.

2. We reserve the right to remove from the festival animations that have violent, or otherwise inappropriate content. We believe our young minds have powerful imagination and thus encourage students to develop submissions that are original in content, but also in theme. There is a lot more than video games to use as an inspiration.

3. Each participant is allowed just one individual submission. In addition, each student may also participate in only one team submission. The individual and team submissions will be judged in separate categories.

4. All submissions must be created by Alice 2.0, Alice 2.2, or Scracth. You can download Alice from http://www.alice.org and Scratch from http://scratch.mit.edu/. Submissions based on Storytelling Alice or Alice 3 will not be accepted.

5. Registration is due on April 16 and submission deadline is April 22.

General Information

1. Although the organizers can help with general questions about the contest, we are not able to help you debug or offer comment on your programs prior to the submission deadline.

2. Seniors who will graduate in 2010 are welcome to participate. Also, elementary and middle school participants are welcome. An additional category for judging may be created if  more than 5 submissions are received from elementary/middle school students.

3. The duration of a movie must not exceed 1 minute. Any part of the movie that is longer than 1 minute will be ignored during judging and not displayed during the presentation session. Submissions that greatly exceed this limitation may be disqualified.

4. Video game (interactive movies) submissions are welcome. However, the judges may only spend around a minute evaluating a game. If the most impressive features of your game are deep into the playing period, they may not be judged. Also, video games that are very challenging to play may cause the more impressive features of the game to be overlooked within the judging time period. Please consider providing instructions for playing your game.

5. All movies will be shown during the festival. Those movies that are given an award will be shown a second time during the awards ceremony.

6. Those receiving an award must be present at the awards ceremony or the award will be given to another student.

1. Each submission will be reviewed blindly. That is, the judges will not know the name or affiliation of the students associated with specific submissions.
2. Judges will evaluate each submission according to the following four criteria (each criteria weighed equally, from 1 to 10 points):
   
   Originality: This criteria evaluates a submission with respect to the uniqueness of the movie compared to other movies that were submitted.
   Creativity: Creativity assesses the degree of imagination exhibited in the movie storyline.
   Technicality: The technicality score awards points to those programs that demonstrate a deep knowledge of Alice to accomplish some clever effect in the movie.
   Overall: The overall score represents the evaluation of the movie with respect to things such as smooth transition among different scenes and overall understandability of the meaning of the movie.