Calling Amateur Film-Makers: Canon is Giving Out $30,000 for Your Drama

Canon has started an online video contest for the Southeast Asia region to celebrate the launch of the Legria HD camcorder. The Legria competition is being held in five Asian countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Amateur film-maker entrants will have a chance to win $30,000 total prizes. In addition to all that cash, this competition will open the door to professional filmmaking industry. The winners will get exclusive mentorship by famous film directors and videographers in their country.

The theme of the contest is Love drama? Create your own. Entrants can actually use any device for the filming – even your smartphone. All you have to do is upload the raw materials from your recording to the Canon Asia site and then produce your two-minute film. You can directly edit the video by using its web app called the Cinema Style simulator. In this way, Canon is introducing the same features that you can find in the Legria HF M52/56 and HF R36/8 series. It’s kind of fun to edit online – not everyone has cool desktop apps like iMovie – and you can see what your video would look like if it were inside the LCD of a camcorder. Though that’s just a marketing gimmick. The video submission deadline is September 30, 2012.

The Canon division director of PT. Datascrip, Merry Harun, said the winners from each country will receive $2,000 and a Canon Legria camcorder. Canon will also pick two winners from the top five most popular videos who will get $5,000 and exclusive mentorship from a film director.

They will get an opportunity of a lifetime to remake their own film with a film director by using the Canon Legria camcorder.

If you don’t have an idea yet about what kind of drama that you’d like to create, perhaps find some inspiration from the Canon Asia Legria microsite. The camera-maker already uploaded a bunch of short films by professional videographers from Southeast Asia who took part in Canon’s challenges before – namely Ifa Isfansyah (Indonesia), Efozy (Malaysia), Mei Wong (Singapore), Panu Aree (Thailand), and Tran Dung Thanh Huy (Vietnam).

With this competition, Canon perhaps expect to reach amateur indie film maker as a target market for getting a Legria. This competition is open only to non-professionals. It also hopes to go viral via YouTube as a sort of Asian version of YouTube’s Your Film Festival.