After last year’s big success of the first Tudou Festival in Moganshan (see my blog post), there will be another one this year. The festival, that sets Tudou apart from its competitors, will be held on April 18 in Shanghai. For this year’s festival Tudou.com partners with the China Film Group Corporation, the most prestigious film production and trading organization in China. As Tudou’s press release from today says, this is a very significant milestone for Tudou: symbolically, the partnership is a marriage between a hundred-year old film industry and the only four-year old Internet video phenomena.
For five of the winners (out of a total of sixteen Award winners) there will be a chance to qualify for China Film’s Youth Director Project or for the New Media Production Project. This opens the door to China Film’s production facilities, funds, resources and channels – a gateway to the serious filming industry.
During the 2009 Tudou Video Festival there will not only be the finals of the Video Awards, but also the first Video Financing Forum. Gary Wang (CEO of Tudou.com) today said about this: “Based on the experience of our first Tudou Video Festival last year, our 2009 campaign aims for a bigger goal to build up the value chain for Internet video creative talents, who are getting insufficient attention and financing at this point. Our goal is to expand development and extend opportunities for amazing talents and vitality that we have seen on Tudou.com, hopefully in real terms such as cash financing and broadcasting opportunities.”
During the video financing forum fifty selected proposals in the categories drama, non-fiction/documentary, music/entertainment, animation, and reality show will do an elevator pitch of their ideas in front of potential content buyers and investors from TV channels, production companies, mobile/new media channels and brand advertisers, simulating a content trading platform. “Bold, indie and fresh are the creative qualities we are looking for,” Gary emphasized. “We hope by increasing exposure of this community that grew with Tudou, more people will get the chance to know and invest the young and uprising community as Tudou is committed to.”
If you have an idea for a video production or have a video that you want to submit for the Tudou Video Festival, you can still do that online until the end of March. The official Tudou Video Festival website you can find here: http://www.tudou.com/events/tudou/videofestival09/index.php