The Tribeca Film Festival in New York City teamed up with Snapchat this year on a competition to find “the best Snapchat Stories across the U.S.” Ten winners were chosen and starting today the work from those creators will be featured in a special Discovery channel within Snapchat.
Aimed at discovering the “next generation of mobile storytellers,” the film festival asked those interested to submit a short film composed using Snapchat among having to fulfill other requirements. This first of its kind competition aimed to cast the spotlight on the imagination and creativity of its users, while also likely touting the ephemeral messaging app being more than something young people used to chat with one another, but what people could do with it, similar to what happened with YouTube.
To view all of the winning short snaps, just look for the call-out in the Discover section of the app.
Snapchat declined to say how many entries it and the Tribeca Film Festival received, or even provide any additional information besides revealing that the winners will appear on the app starting today.
Here are the winners of the short snap competition:
- Brother Broadway, Luke Versaw (Brooklyn) – Two native Ohio brothers move to NYC in hopes of making their father proud by realizing their dream of becoming Broadway stars, but they soon discover making it to Broadway won’t be so easy.
- Girl Meets Toy, Luke Ramsay (Austin) – After facing romantic rejection, a young woman finds escapist romance in an unusual place.
- Hot Dogs Forever, Tessa Greenberg (Brooklyn) – Best pals, Jarrod and Tessa, celebrate their friendship over the course of 60 years.
- Lost It: A Snap Story, Colin Garland (Brooklyn) – On his first day in New York, a vlogger loses his mobile device. He desperately tries to get it back and save his story.
- The Magic Pot, John Crilo (Brooklyn) – A lonely boy looking for answers finds a magical pot at the end of the rainbow and his luck starts to change.
- MemE! True Hollywood Story, Andrew Morreale (Los Angeles) – One man’s fleeting experience with achieving internet fame as a meme.
- Past Perfect, Esha Gupta (Oakland) – A woman’s Snaps from the future begin to alter her past… unleashing a series of unforeseen events.
- Pencils, Kat Vlasova (Reston) – You know that time when you’re trying your best to study but you just keep getting distracted? And then you get so preoccupied with doing a random simple thing just to procrastinate on your homework such as looking for a pencil? And then before you know it, you’ve chased a man out into space but your calculus is still unresolved and it’s already 10pm? Yeah, me too.
- The Secret Stash, Mariann Isola (Sacremento) – A story about two brothers that embark on a journey to find their grandfathers hidden fortune.
- SO FLY! The journey of RICO STAR, Robert (Tito) Rogers (North Hollywood) – This story is about the rise and fall of Rico Star, an American one hit wonder.
It was only a matter of time until we saw people started to take advantage of Snapchat’s capabilities to take the app to its next level from a creation standpoint. In March, someone made an 8-bit stop-motion video using fruits and the drawing tools within the app. People are consuming video on Snapchat at an alarming rate — in February it was reported that users watch 8 billion videos daily and increase from November when there were 6 billion daily video views.
Based on the success of the Tribeca Film Festival competition, could this usher in a new focus for Snapchat to release professional tools for creators to create more of these clips?