BlizzCon creative contests open for entries

Attention aspiring artist, songwriters, and machinimators: want to win an awesome Alienware laptop? Sure you do. Well, here's your chance. Blizzard is holding three creative contests at BlizzCon this summer: best fan art, best original song, and best movie using WoW footage (i.e. machinima).

Entrants in each category have until July 31 to submit their best work. Various countries and localities around the world are eligible, although not all; this is due to legal issues, and not Blizzard hating Italians and residents of Vermont (which Alex claims are called "Vermites").

For the full rules, see Blizzard's contest page, but the general guidelines for submissions are as follows:

• Art must be high-res Photoshop files.

• Movies must be under three minutes and 100 MB, and should be WMVs, AVIs, or MOVs. Music must be either by the entrant or by Blizzard.

• Songs must be MP3s under 2 minute and 5 MB. Lyrics (if any) should be without profanity, in English, Spanish, French, German, Korean, or Chinese, and if not in English, must come with a written English translation.

For second place in each category, Blizzard will be awarding some Razer equipment, and third place will get an unspecified NVIDIA video card. The top two winners in the Movie contest also each get a copy of Adobe CS4, which is pretty sweet. So get creating!