Harry Potter discussion forum for movies, books, and more! - The Leaky Lounge: Brainstorming for Ideas - Harry Potter discussion forum for movies, books, and more! - The Leaky Lounge

Welcome to the Brainstorming Thread of the Contest Corner! We asked you what type of contests you like. Now we're asking for your ideas!

This thread is here for those who have contest ideas they want to share with us. It's a place where you can place your ideas, have others critique your ideas (is it plausible? Would you participate? How would you add/tweak the idea?), and perhaps get your ideas made into actual contests!

If the Contest Team finds an idea we like, we will use that idea and create an actual contest for everyone to participate in. The person who came up with the initial idea will be awarded a Wizard Wood Wand and given credit for the idea when the contest is announced and used. If a contest evolves by the contribution of many people, the people who contributed significantly to the contest idea will be placed into a drawing for the wand. Please remember that just naming your contest idea (e.g. create a Chocolate Frog card) is swell and all, but doesn't really help anyone in understanding
your vision of the contest. Therefore, please give us more than just the name or one-liner about your contest idea.

So...Get your thinking caps on and start brainstorming or suggesting contests you'd like to see or participate in!

it might be fun to do something with video - maybe something like fan fiction, but acted out. or movie spoofs, HBP or DH trailers...

Here's an idea for a contest: Hogwarts Scavenger Hunt

Premise: You need to collect seven items from around Harry Potter’s world in order to complete a particularly tricky spell or potion that requires artifacts, tokens, magical objects, and uncommon or specific ingredients. Locations can be from any place mentioned in the books that Harry has been to or seen in a memory or vision. The object has to be one mentioned in the books as well.

As if you were starting from your common room, give directions to the first location by describing the location itself not with specific step-by-step, turn-by-turn directions, but by explaining some unique trivia about it or playing a word game with the location’s name. Then do the same for the object you need to collect. Move in turn through each of the seven locations and seven objects.

Contest staff could come up with the seven location/object combinations for players to guess. Alternately, similar to the Riddles contest this could be a two part challenge with contestants first submitting their scavenger hunt location/item combinations and in the second part we try to guess the answers to the top three sets of submissions. In this case I would recommend limiting the number of locations/objects submitted by one person to three (giving nine total second part combinations to guess).

Example: To get this location you need to combine one of Hagrid’s favorite meal ingredients with a tennis racquet maker and a topographic projection. If you need a hint Mr. Weasley can guide you along. Once there you will find an object that had two uses in life. In both cases its sole purpose was to carry you on your way.


Answer:


The idea for this contest was shamelessly stolen from the Nov. 10, 2008 episode of the ‘A Way With Words’ podcast in which Quiz Guy John Chaneski takes podcast hosts Martha and Grant on a round-the-world 'International Puzzle Hunt'. The puzzle segment starts at 13:00 minutes into the podcast.

Idea used by Contest Team

This post has been edited by mjk: 30 November 2011 - 10:21 PM

onespeedonly, what a great idea--thanks for sharing!

My pleasure! Glad you liked it.

I’m sure you have no shortage of photo contest ideas but here is another one. It was inspired by the stop-motion animation movie of Deathly Hallows done by Ryan Freerksen. Pick you favorite scene in any book and recreate it out of, well, anything and submit a photograph of it. Can be life size, a shoebox diorama, or any size in between. Must be an original photograph of a scene you create with minimal photo-manipulation. The focus is not so much on the photography although feel free to get creative with it. The goal is the creative depiction of JKR’s imagery with “stuff” you have lying around or can cobble together to bring the wizarding world off the page and into three dimensions. It can even be (original) two-dimensional drawings placed in a three-dimensional scene. The spirit of the idea is about creating the scene so no pre-made figures or sets (i.e. HP LEGOs or Tonner dolls, etc.). Yes, I know it’s similar to the Garden Gnome Tree Topper contest but here you get to pick the scene and have a little latitude on scale.

Idea used by Contest Team

This post has been edited by mjk: 30 November 2011 - 10:21 PM

Hi, I'm fairly new here, so I don't know if this has already been done, or if something like this already exists. My idea is this: Most of us recognize the symbols for dollar, pound, yen and euro. Are there any symbols for Galleons, Sickles and Knuts? If not, perhaps there could be a contest to design them. Being able to design a font that could be downloaded could be optional (though that would be cool), as I think that would limit the entries quite a bit. I'd be more interested in the graphic design, and how entrants would put a wizarding spin on the symbols to make them readable and recognizable, but unlike anything Muggle.

Just my 2 Knuts!

Idea used by Contest Team

This post has been edited by mjk: 30 November 2011 - 10:21 PM

onespeedonly and paint it Black, we love you ideas. Keep them coming!!

paint it Black, that is a great idea! Sounds fun and challenging

And thanks, FredFan.

This post has been edited by onespeedonly: 23 March 2009 - 07:42 PM

Here is an idea for a contest.
In SoS, Dean Thomas makes a banner for Harry for the quidditch match.
It could be fun to design a banner for Harry, Gryffindor, or maybe the other houses. I am not too artistic but I would love to see what others could do.