Just recently we had blogged about Buzz18 launching a short film contest for amateur directors. Well this trend of short films looks like increasing as i stumbled upon 2 more sites looking to attract similar kind of film making audience and leverage their talent to create a pool of user generated short films.
First in the line is a website known as filmaka.in which is the indian counterpart of the international site filmaka.com which is has been running a online short film competition since a couple of months now. Every month a film is chosen among those films uploaded and the winner gets prizes. The best part about this competition is the indian jury which consists of elite filmmakers like Farhan akhtar, Ashutosh Gowarikar, Santosh Sivan and Vishal Bhardwaj and artists like Shabana Azmi, Rahul bose, Anil Kapoor and others.
Though if you thought that this is a youtube for amateur filmmakers then its not! Infact there is a registration fee one needs to pay to participate which mean only a little serious film makers with some passion would make the effort to participate (thereby increasing the overall quuality of content.) Also filmaka has some guidelines on content as well given here which seem pretty stringent. The competition winner over one year will actually get a chance to direct a movie.
Its not only dedicated sites like filmaka even social networks like Indyarocks have launched their own short film festival
According to Dr. Vishnu, Head of Strategy, Indyarocks “There is a huge amount of digital content that gets created in the offline world and it usually never gets the kind of audience it deserves. Indyarocks film festival gives an opportunity to everyone to display their creativity not only to their family and friends but a whole new audience across the world.”
The Indyarocks short film festival will be 2 months long and will allow 1-10 minutes short film and will allow films shot using digital cameras, camcorders, or even cell phones. The categories under which the films can be submitted are Fiction/Experimental, Documentary, Animation and Mobile. They plan to incentivise the participation by a special Viewers choice award and six Jury awards.
I think this agreat way of inviting serious content producers and co-create quality content in video format. Rediff ishare did the same by launching initiatives like anecho. Such contests and competitions automatically raises the quality of content produced and published on the site.
