New Indie film site The Auteurs, which is in private beta, is trying to make a big splash around the Cannes Film Festival later this week with a competition. And they’ve lined up some big sponsors to help them.
The competition is sponsored by HP, Facebook and Flip. Users pick up one of 250 free Flip cameras at the festival and shoot a three minute short film. The winner, as judged by a jury, gets a $10,000 cash prize (funded by Facebook) and a HP Workstation with a 30-inch monitor. Everyone gets to keep those Flip cameras, too, which you can sell on eBay for $20 or more.
These movies are going to be awful. The Flip video camera is dead simple to use (unless you are on a Mac, and then it’s exactly the opposite of dead simple to use), but the quality of the video is about as bad as you can get. Given that, I think they should give out awards for the worst movies as well. In fact, I think they should drop the jury idea and post all the videos online and let users vote. That would make for great content.
Anyway, even though the site is invite only at this point, you can get in through a back door - their Facebook application. Just add the application and you’ll have an account on the main site, too.
Putting the competition stunt aside, The Auteurs does have some good indie films on the site already. There is a lot of competition in this space (Jaman, Netflix, others), though. Indie films are in high demand.
Assuming you appreciate corrections:
sponosred -> sponsored
I live 40 mins from Cannes, might go check it out this yr
Looks interesting. Thanks for the back door tip!
Hello!
The link for the backdoor (i.e Movie Theater app on Facebook) is wrong. The correct URL for the app is http://apps.facebook.com/movietheater.
Now back to the short film corner in Cannes..
/efe
great ui for the account creation. it takes your name from Facebook and automatically makes you an account.
From FB to FC on TC. While we’re at it, why not a plug for FC, that is, FILMCOMMUNITY.COM. We’re also in Cannes right now. No longer in beta but more “stealth mode” because its raining here in the South of France.
Auteurs’ vision is “to create a global community” (source:Crunchbase). That sounds familiar. We take pride in describing the global reach of our international community of filmmakers and MovieMaker’s recent story about us was headlined “Website Brings Together the Global FILMCOMMUNITY”.
FILMCOMMUNITY.COM is the social network for the Film Industry Worldwide. We already have some 2,800 film professional members from 120 countries sharing 110 languages, all joining us within a matter of months, not to mention hundreds of good, original films on our site.
Many of our members are prizewinners from the major international film festivals including Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca, Venice, Berlin, and Toronto, as well as the Oscars. Its free to join FILMCOMMUNITY.COM. The only catch is that you have to be a film professional and they’re all film fans btw.
Wishing you all the best, Efe with TAC (The Auteurs Cinema) and hope to meet you here in Cannes. TC has my contact info.
as with the rest thanks for the facebook tip. This site makes me happy and sad- happy cause its everything I’ve been saying for the past year about independent film online to my work (well almost) and sad that people didn’t listen- at least I can hope that this will wake a few people up