Celebrate the Web Launches Week-Long Web Pilot Festival

Aspiring and professional web series creators around the world, are you in need of some motivation? Do you have an idea you’ve been kicking around for the greatest piece of online entertainment ever, but lack of a production crew, minimal resources, or the overwhelming weight of inertia is holding you back from making it happen? Or are you all about creating web series all the time and want a great excuse to get another pilot under your belt and an aggregate 12 hours of sleep over the course of one week?

Celebrate the Web has just the festival for you.

Jenni Powell, Kim Evey, Taryn O’Neill, and Stephanie Thorpe are bringing back the event that celebrates the “new media/web video community of creators and supporters” for its fourth iteration, dubbed ‘Raising the Bar.’ This time, Celebrate the Web will take the shape of a 24 or 48-hour film festival stretched over the course of one week (or an installment of Channel 101 condensed into one week), in which teams of any shape and size will create a five-minute-or-less pilot for a potential web series.

Here’s how it works:

• The first 12 interested individuals who supply the Celebrate the Web Organizers with a link to previous work showing he or she is “committed to finishing the festival and producing a pilot,” will be team captains.
• Topics, themes, lines of dialogue, items or whatever else the organizers deem you must include in your pilot will be announced during a lives streamed event on March 3.
• Final pilots must then be delivered by 9AM on March 9, with a viewing ceremony to follow on the evening of March 10 at the ACME Comedy Theatre in Los Angeles.
• The winner of ‘Raising the Bar’ will be determined by votes from the live in-theater audience and those watching the event’s live stream. Blip.tv is coming back on board as a Celebrate the Web sponsor and will award the winner with a TBD cash prize. (Others interested in sponsoring Celebrate the Web 4 should contact the organizers at this e-mail address.)
• And although the screening ceremony will take place in LA, content creators worldwide are encouraged to participate.

“One of the things that I can say I’m most excited about is the opportunity for these pilots to be the stepping stone towards actual web series,” O’Neill told me over e-mail. “The final products will automatically be seen by the community and the larger web series fan base…Audiences will have a chance to immediately become fans of some, if not all of these pilots, and that is such a great building block to getting a series going.”

A few things I’m excited about (in addition to what O’Neill says above) are the team names. Anyone who thinks of one with online video references that’s witty initially, but less funny each time you hear it will get major bonus points in my book.

For more details, including where and how to apply, go to CelebrateTheWeb.com.