As Sean wrote, that weekend is the time they should be released and not before.

However, if you have a valid reason why you want to submit your film earlier (note that submission and release are not the same thing) then I don't see why you couldn't.

If, for example, you were going to be travelling or visiting relatives or on the moon or something that weekend and couldn't get to a computer then you would be able to upload your film to a password-protected place, send me the email and then publicly release the film after you got back to civilisation.

However, in order to do that, you should organise it with as much advance notice as possible.

I don't see how that would be an advantage or disadvantage to anybody, other than having less time to animate.

Yes, I don't see why not. So long as the file will be available for a while (I didn't see anything like ImageShacks' "deleted if nobody looks at it for a month" policy, but I only had a quick look). It seems fairly simple to use.

The key factors in deciding where to host your movie would be: will it handle many downloads (possibly every member of this site would want to watch all the entries), will the file be available in another month/year and will it handle files the size of your film.

I've been looking for a cheap and easy way of converting films to FLV format, which makes it fairly easy to share (and they end up smaller than wmv or avi files) but I have not seen one.

Really?

I don't see why not. So long as it isn't publicly available then it is still within the rules. Presumably you can change its status afterwards to make it viewable by anyone, yes?

Correct. I haven't fone it before but as I understand it, When you upload a video you can choose to make it viewable privately to a maximum of 25 people on your youtube friends list.

I'll enter because I really need a new camera. My Powershot is being stupid right now and won't hook up to the computer for live feed.

Good grief, someone needs to fix this boy's grammar.

I'm thinking of entering. I was actually thinking of making a Sham-Wow commercial in Lego recently, just animated to sync the actual commercial, so I could get back into the swing of animating minifigs, but I think I'll give this a shot.

I wouldn't mind winning a 9k, and my animation is going a bit rusty.

I think I will probably enter this if I find some extra time. Great contest idea!:)