FILMAKA : The Online Film Competition
This comes from Ashwini Srikantiah of Filmaka…
Filmaka.com is a new online film competition, where the grand prize is a feature film contract. The Jury is amazing, and includes Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Neil LaBute, and Paul Schrader (!!). It’s put together by a very strong group of producers, executive producers and financiers including Deepak Nayar (which is how I got hooked into it).
Filmaka.com is a twice monthly competition, which accepts films from all over the world in 10 different languages. Every two weeks, Filmaka.com will announce a new Entry Level contest topic, and filmmakers will have about two weeks to create and upload a 1-3 minute short film based on the topic. The top 15 Entry Level competitors will each get a $500 cash prize, and $1000 for a production budget to create a new 1-3 minute short for the Jury Level. The Jury will then choose a winner and a runner up from these top 15; the winner will win $3000, the runner-up $1000, and both will have a chance to compete at the end of the year, against all other winners and runner-ups, for the feature film contract.
Because of the growing market for short form web content, the founders are trying to attract serious filmmakers to this form. They hope to be able to package and sell some of these shorts, and have built in a 50/50 revenue share, so that if they make any money off a film, the filmmaker gets half.
There is an entry fee, but it’s nominal (between $15 for your first entry, $10 for each one following). You can enter as many times as you want to during the year, and you can even submit multiple entries to one competition. If you become a winner or runner-up two or three times, that means that you get to create two or three shorts at the end of the year to compete for the grand prize contract. I can tell you from working on this project that all of the Filmaka.com founders and jury members are really looking forward to seeing new, fresh talent. They are looking for filmmakers with unique voices, and they believe that the web is the way to find them.
There is a lot more information on the website: www.filmaka.com, and I really hope that many of you will compete. Word about Filmaka.com is travelling fast, and I think we’ll have more competitors with each successive contest, so those who enter in the first few contests will probably have an advantage.
The first contest is going on right now, and the topic is “Stuck in Traffic.” The final upload date is December 28. Please pass the word along to people who might be interested, and feel free to give them my email address too. This is a great, and rare opportunity, and talented filmmakers should really be involved.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
nice little link here, not interested in participating but certainly am interested in the enteries