Lions Gate will host a contest for aspiring female directors to create short films based on characters from Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight saga. The participants will consult Meyers’ 2011 encyclopedic tome, The Twilight Saga: Official Illustrated Guide.
Deadline reports that five winners will be selected to receive production advances to finance their short films. The five installments of “The Storytellers — New Creative Voices of ‘The Twilight Saga'” series will be released exclusively on Facebook in 2015. From there, fans will vote on which filmmaker deserves a grand prize which includes cash and career opportunities.
Here’s more from The New York Times: “A group of female panelists, including the Twilight actress Kristen Stewart and Ms. Meyer, will select the winning shorts and mentor participants, Lions Gate said. Other panelists include the actresses Kate Winslet, Octavia Spencer and Julie Bowen; Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first Twilight movie; the film producer Cathy Schulman; and Jennifer Lee, who co-directed Frozen. Certain contest details, including the length of the shorts, are still being worked out and will be made available on Tongal.com, a crowdsourcing platform.”