ADDISON, IL -

An Addison family could find themselves with $25,000 to use for their children’s college funds if a home video they created is chosen as part of a contest on the Web site of a popular children’s electronic product.

Maggie O’Brien, 11, and her two younger sisters recently entered the LeapFrog Learning Moments contest, where the kids made a home video of themselves showing how the Leap Frog educational toys have changed their lives.

The kids made their two-minute video after their mother saw the contest information on the Web site. The contest features children submitting images and videos of themselves learning with the LeapFrog toys, with the best videos voted on by visitors to the site.

Their video is one of the top three vying for the $25,000 college tuition prize from among more than 2,000 entries received in the contest, according to the LeapFrog Web site. Internet voting for the contest ends Tuesday, Jan. 15, according to the site.
LeapFrog Enterprises Inc., based in Emeryville, Calif., manufactures products such as the Leapster electronic game, the FLY_Fusion Pen, the LeapPad and other electronic educational items and toys for children up to high school age.

“I was trying to find out how to fix one of the Leapster toys the kids have on the Web site and I read about the contest on there,” said Dawn O’Brien, the girls’ mother. “I mentioned it to Maggie, and she just ran with the idea.”

The family made the video, which features a flashback with Maggie and her sisters, Liz, 6, and Katie, 4, on how Leap Frog has made her smarter. Her sisters portray a younger Maggie growing up with the game products in a flashback scene.

To see the O'Briens' video, go to http://obvideo.tripod.com.

“That was all Maggie’s doing. She told them what to say and how to act,” their mother said.

Maggie, a student at St. Philip the Apostle School in Addison, said she came up with the flashback idea as a way to get all their LeapFrog products into the video.

“I just thought of it as a way of getting everything in the movie, since some of them are not in my age group,” she said.

After shooting the video, Maggie edited it through Windows Movie Maker on their home computer, which allowed her to add effects, titles and other enhancements for the video. One effect she said gave her the look of old-fashioned grainy film clips, which she used in the flashback scenes.

“It was really fun editing it. This was the first time I ever worked with video, and it’s something I wouldn’t mind doing again,” she said. 

Dawn said the family then uploaded their video to the Web site last November for the contest, but then forgot about it, as other videos had hundreds of votes within the first day of the voting.

“When we checked back a couple weeks ago, we found out that our video was one of the three top vote getters,” she said. “I guess others had been disqualified because people were hacking into the site and altering vote counts.”

If the O’Briens win, Dawn said the prize money would be split up among the college funds of all three of the girls.

“It’s been an exciting thing for the kids, even if we don’t win,” she said. “We have friends and relatives all over the country, even in Italy, who have seen the video, and it’s caused a lot of excitement for the kids.”