YouTube offers big cash prize to budding filmmakers

Everyone’s got a story to tell, so the old saying goes. It seems YouTube believes it too. The world’s most popular video-sharing site is offering US$500 000 for you to tell your story.

The competition, called Your Film Festival, is open to anyone with an internet connection and encourages users to submit “a short-story driven video”.

According to YouTube, the entries can be in “any format — short film, web-series episode, TV pilot — and any genre”.

After a period of voting, the top 10 entries will be sent to open the 2012 Venice Film Festival. Out of these 10, a final winner be chosen and given “a $500,000 grant to create a new work, produced by Ridley Scott and his world-class team”.

This is not the first time that YouTube has conducted a competition with a fairly major prize. In 2011, its Space Lab programme invited school children from around the world to send in videos of them conducting experiments. The winners then had the chance to see their experiments being conducted in space.