Ketchup

Courtesy of the ever-excellent Contagious 

If you’re an aspiring film-maker, sit up and listen. Combining sponsorship, user-generated content, a competition, social networking and some pretty advertising, the latest initiative in HP’s steady reinvention from tedious hardware manufacturer to create powerhouse is as integrated as they come.

For the launch of Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s latest book, ‘The Witch of Portobello’, HP has facilitated an online competition through YouTube and on a bespoke site through which aspiring filmmakers cans collaborate on the film of the book.

“The book, ‘The Witch of Portobello’, is divided into 15 narrators/perspectives.  Most of them - 13 - directly interact with the main character.

You may register and choose your character (limited to 200 filmmakers per character).  I would like that each filmmakers chooses a character and film their perspective.  Those that wish to participate will have to record a cideo and upload it into their YouTube account.  This filmmaker will have to illustrate the scenes where the narrator interacts with the main character.

We also invite musicians from MySpace to create either a general theme for the feature film… We will pay $1500 for the theme chosen.”

To promote the competition, Goodby Silverstein & Partners teamed up with Transistor Studios in New York to extend their wildly successful ‘hands’ series of commericals.  This time, instead of Jay Z and Serena Williams, it’s the aspiring hopefuls who get involved, applying their own perspected to Coelho’s narrative in a lovely fusion of graphics and live action.

Coelho’s narratives would seem an ideal starting point for this kind of content, although we’re not entirely sure about the conditions that have been set.  They want exclusive rghts to stunning, length content with a high production value for the bargain sum of $3000 and (fingers crossed) a bit of exposure?  In an age in which great content tends to distribute itself, it’ll be interested to see whether this provs to be enough of an incentive to the vast well of untapped talent out there.