Mofilm Brings Brands and Talent to Tribeca Film Festival

Posted by Sheila Shayon on March 3, 2011 03:00 PM

Mofilm is heading back to the Tribeca Film Festival (which kicks off April 20) and once again inviting video and film whizzes to join them.

The challenge: create a winning short film for a brand, just as Lloyd Choi and Simon Yang did to win the PepsiFilms Barcelona short film contest above with their short, above, titled "Creative Control."

The 2011 Mofilm/Tribeca Film Fest competition sponsors include Cadillac, Chevrolet, Renaissance Hotels, Microsoft, AT&T and an as-yet-to-be-named brand.

The deadline for submissions is April 4th, and the lure for directors and advertising creatives is clear: besides money (cash prizes range from $1,000 to $8,000) and a trip to New York, the screening at the Tribeca Film Festival is a calling card at one of the world's leading film marketplaces.

Mofilm is a global community of filmmakers eager to bring their creative skills to creating branded entertainment for major brand marketers. Their tagline: “Helping aspiring filmmakers create videos for big brands and social causes.”

A privately funded company with offices in Manchester, London and San Francisco, Mofilm began in 2007 as a project with the Sundance Institute and GSM Association as pioneers of 'made-for-mobile' content (the name is a mashup of mobile + film, although it has expanded beyond its original mobile focus).

They run the world's largest annual mobile film festival in Barcelona, Spain, and work with mobile operators in over 50 countries world-wide to distribute original shortform content for mobile, sharing revenue 50/50 with filmmakers.

Celeb filmmakers such as Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, Isabella Rossellini and Spike Lee have all participated, as well as thousands of aspiring wannabes.

Unilever partnered with Mofilm last year to crowdsource short films for 13 of its brands, a project which yielded more than 10,000 submissions. Other brands that have crowdsourced creative through Mofilm include Best Buy, Nokia, HP, VISA, Pepsi, Telstra, and Campbell’s Soup.

Who says art and commerce can't work together?

More about: Mofilm, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Renaissance Hotels, Microsoft, AT&T, Crowdsourcing, Pepsi, Branded Entertainment, Film, Video, Entertainment, Advertising, Mobile

Kerry Gaffney says:

Hello,

My name's Kerry Gaffney and I'm the director of Social Media for MOFILM. This is a great article but has one small error, in that we didn't get 10,000 submissions for the Unilever Consumer Creative Challenge although we did have 25,000 brief s downloaded. For our most recent competition, Barcelona, we had over 1,000 submissions and expect the same for our next competition in TriBeCa.

March 7, 2011 09:38 AM #