Image via NASA.gov
Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS) has an ongoing collaboration with NASA called CineSpace; it’s an annual international short film competition “that offers filmmakers around the world a chance to share their works inspired by, and using, actual NASA imagery.” This, in its tenth year, is a big open call (last year they received around 700 submissions representing 55 countries and narrowed it down to 13 finalists, and director Richard Linklater was the juror). There are five cash prizes, and the winners’ entries will be screened at the annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival in November.
Filmmakers are invited to use material from The NASA Image and Video Library, a consolidated website featuring 60 different collections and more than 140,000 NASA images, as well as other NASA archives: video from human spaceflight, the International Space Station, the Orion Program, etc., and plenty of super-spiffy time-lapse videos of Earth.
The prize money is respectable. CineSpace prizes break down as follows:
First Overall Prize – $10K
Second Overall Prize – $5K
Third Overall Prize – $3K
Special Award for submission best demonstrating “Film Best Depicting Benefits of Space to Humanity” – $4K
Special Award for submission best highlighting “Film Best Depicting Future Space Exploration” – $4K
Submissions are accepted until July 31, 2018. Go here for more info and guidelines for entering.
