From Oolon Sputnik, words has reached us of an exciting machinima contest that is open to residents of Second Life. And the first prize is really stupendous.
Oolon says: – If people have machinima, The Wyoming Short Film Contest is offering a massive $25,000 (that’s $, not L$) first prize for entries. All genres welcome.
This is the 2nd Annual Wyoming Short Film Contest, open to all genres and filmmakers of all skill levels. Deadline for submissions is April 30.
Last year’s winner, David Gonzales from Jackson, WY, only found out about the contest a few days before last year’s deadline, submitted four short videos and won!
Being open to machinima, this is a great opportunity for folks on the grid, and the prize money is will come in especially handy for the filmmakers in this crazy economic downturn.
The rules state: “…all entries to take place in Wyoming, feature Wyoming, or present Wyoming as a major character in the storyline”. That’s a pretty open brief for a $25k prize!
This would be prefect for a short shot in the likes of the Western Sims Community, Deadwood, or pretty much any genre within its remit. There’s no entry fee, and application is by a simple upload.
Oolon thinks that this would be an excellent way to raise the profile of the grid’s great content and machinima in SL – and we agree!
More information is available here: http://pitch.pe/5178, and you can see more about Oolon and his work at: http://www.youtube.com/user/OolonSputnik.
PS – we know that Tombstone is NOT in Wyoming – but we had some lovely Western images from Issue 4 of the Primgraph which we thought we would share!
Prim Perfect 
It would be well to review the direct information from the Wyoming Film office about this contest, since the competition pretty clearly focuses on RL sim videography (and on promoting the Wyoming film industry), not machinima. Direct link is: http://filmwyoming.blogspot.com/2008/11/2nd-annual-wyoming-short-film-contest.html
Also, I have to flinch at the totem pole in SL Tombstone picture – while “Not possible IRL” could be invoked here, traditional totem poles are specific to the indigenous coastal tribes of the US and Canadian Northwest where the Western Redcedar grows. It’s a tad hard to carve totem poles out of tumbleweeds!
To be honest, I hesitated over the picture of the Indian viillage too. I think we are dealing with a generic West here and, as you rightly point out, with the terms of the contest focusing so much on the real state, great care would need to be taken if submitting a machinima.