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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0