Frequently Asked Questions

Q Which UH campuses are eligible?

A  All of them: Main, Downtown, Clear Lake, Victoria, Sugar Land and Cinco Ranch

Q How many times may I enter?

A You may contribute to a maximum of 2 entries, whether the entry is submitted in your name or someone else's.

Q What is the Gulf Coast Consortia and who is eligible?

A Students and researchers from the GCC member institutions: Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, University of Houston, UT Health Science Center at Houston, UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and UT Medical Branch at Galveston.

Q One of the people who worked on my presentation is not at any of the eligible institutions.  Can I still enter?

A Yes, as long as that person is not a professional filmmaker or audio-visual expert, and as long as they contributed only a small portion of the work involved.

Q I made a film with my friend Bob, but Bob doesn’t want to enter.  Can I submit it anyway?

A No.  All creative participants must agree to enter.

Q There is some copyrighted material in my visualization.  Is it eligible?

A Maybe.  If the work is essentially a new work, and if you are complying with normal “fair use” guidelines, or if you have obtained permission from the copyright holder you are probably OK.  However, it is your responsibility to make sure it is OK.

Q I have a film I made in class last year.  Can I submit it?

A Yes.  But not the one you made two years ago.

Q My film may break your rules on nudity and political axe-grinding, BUT IT IS ART!!!  Why won’t you accept it?

A This isn’t the venue to try and engage the supreme court in a censorship argument.  Submit it if you feel that strongly, but it will have to be truly stunning (or very subtle!) art indeed to get past our pre-screening process.

Q My film is 5:03 long.  Am I disqualified?  How about 6:30?  How about 20 minutes?

A 5:03, no problem.  6:30 is probably OK.  20 minutes?  Don’t push it!  Our attitude is this:  We don’t want you to miss the opportunity over a few seconds running time.  We also don’t want you to have to butcher your work to hack it down to 5 minutes, but if we get a lot of entries there just won’t be time to screen them all.  If your work is fascinating we may not notice the stopwatch has run down, but close calls will be judged in favor of those which comply with the guidelines.

Q My presentation is an unusual file of type ???.  Is that OK?

A Maybe.  This is one of those things which will depend on the number of entries we get.  We will do our best to read your DVD.  If we fail (either because of a disk burning problem or a file type issue) and if we have time we will try and contact you to figure out if there is a conversion that will work.  Make sure you put the important details of how your DVD was created on your entry form. Also make sure you put good contact information down.  It will be the safest thing to choose common file types.  Also, as the rules say, if you are planning on 8 megapixel resolution or a rendered 3D video, please contact us as soon as you can.

Q What categories are there?

A The main division will be to separate scientific and engineering visualization from arts and humanities films and video.  However, there is a grey area there.  Depending on the number and type of submissions we may subdivide areas into smaller groups, to allow similar work to be judged together and to allow all entries a roughly equal chance at prizes.

Q Who are the judges?

A They are not finalized yet, nor will they be until we see what categories we need to create.  When that happens we will do our best to choose experts from closely related fields.

Q What are the prizes?

A They are not finalized yet either, but we should know that fairly soon.  Please check back to this website in a few days.

Q I have a question about the festival.  Who do I ask?

A If your question is not answered here, or on the rules page, send email to:

vvfinfo@mail.tlc2.uh.edu

If you do not receive an immediate reply please be patient, it means we have had a lot of email.