PRNewswire — After receiving over 3,000 submissions in their recent online video contest, Mega Bloks has announced the Grand Prize winner: “The Rookie” produced by Tyler Gregory, a 22 year old student studying Entertainment Art/Animation at California State University. Tyler’s video won the title based on its overall cinematography, originality and content.

The community-driven competition was launched this past summer to mark the 10th anniversary of the hugely successful Halo videogame franchise, and required contestants to submit toymations – stop motion animations featuring toys from the Mega Bloks Halo Authentic Collectors Series.

“The creativity, talent and dedication that our fans demonstrated during this contest was truly inspiring”, says Andrew Sparkes, Vice President of Boys & Collectors Brand Management at MEGA Brands. “The diverse content that was produced using our toys, from action-packed battle scenes to dance videos, was an amazing creative expression of the Halo universe by construction toy fans.”

Tyler Gregory said he initially heard about the contest at Halo Fest in Seattle, WA, only one month before the submission deadline. “I decided to enter anyways and just try my best,” says Tyler, “it took me 1 week to build all the sets, 2 weeks to film and take care of post production effects, and almost a full day to do sound editing. I basically worked on the video constantly whenever I was awake, and managed to finish the film on the deadline day.”

In order to win this competition, participants like Tyler needed to generate as many votes as possible for their videos. They did so, notably by using social media and word-of-mouth. Then, the top 10 videos were published on October 17 at which point MEGA’s panel of expert judges took the lead in selecting the winner and runners-up.

These judges included:

• Pascal Blais, film producer and owner of the Academy Award winning Pascal Blais Studios;
• Michael “Burnie” Burns , co-creator of the series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles;
• Jessica Shea, Community Manager at 343 Industries and avid Halo gamer;
• Fred Kennedy (a.k.a Fearless Fred), host of Fred At Night, on Teletoon At Night;
• Andrew Sparkes, Vice President of Boys & Collectors Brand Management at MEGA Brands.

To honor his work, Tyler will be receiving incredible prizes including the complete Fall 2011 Mega Bloks Halo Collection, video animation software, hardware and much more.

“The Rookie” video will also be featured on Waypoint, Microsoft’s official “destination” for Halo news, at the end of November.

To see Tyler Gregory’s winning entry, the 2^nd and 3^rd place winners and other participant submissions, please visit halotoymation.megabloks.com

Image Courtesy of   http://halo.megabloks.com

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