In the spring of 2007, Fantastic Fest, along with AMD/DELL and ME-TV, issued a challenge – make a trailer for a sequel that doesn’t exist yet and that really never should. 60 filmmakers from around the world answered that call, but one month later, only 40 teams had managed to finish their trailer.

Schindler’s Lists won the judges’ hearts as the absolute best, while Son or Daughter? Of Glen or Glenda? came in a close second place. The Audience Award at the screenings went to Mascot Wedding’s hilarious buddy comedy, Mement2, a sequel to Memento that finally imagines what would happen if Leonard got a wacky new roommate. Those trailers live on at www.FilmmakingFrenzy.com, the home on the web for all of our filmmaking competitions. If you want to get a sense for how to prepare for this year’s competition, the best thing you can do is head to that website and check out last year’s winners.

This year’s contest will operate a little bit differently than last time, but the spirit of the contest will definitely remain the same. Teams will still have up to one month to conceive, shoot and edit a completely unnecessary sequel.  And once again, your team will also have to design and upload a theatrical movie poster for your sequel, too.  This year, however, you won’t be able to just choose any movie that’s ever existed and shoot your sequel trailer to that. We had that kind of luxury last year because the whole idea of an Unnecessary Sequel contest was brand new, but this time around we want to make sure that teams haven’t been shooting their sequel for a full year (even though those movies would undoubtedly be super bad ass), because that just wouldn’t be fair.

So this time around, we’ll be accepting registrations from now through July 16. On July 17, we’ll launch the contest in Austin with a pre-shooting party that will also lead in to the midnight screening of the most necessary sequel of the year, THE DARK KNIGHT. The pre-party will be themed as Bruce Wayne’s Charity Casino Night, and will feature casino games for non-cash prizes. Also at this pre-shooting party, we’ll be assigning each team a genre, a prop, and a line of dialogue. Every Unnecessary Sequel that’s submitted will have to adhere to these guidelines, and if you’re assigned a comedy you won’t be able to make DIE HARD 5 just by saying that you found the fourth one to be super ridiculous. Sorry. But just imagine what sort of hijinks you can have that nutty professor get up to this time!

Teams at the pre-party will have a precious few hours where they’ll know their assignments before we post them all online, but as they’ll be spending much of that time watching THE DARK KNIGHT, everyone will have the same amount of actual production time – one month. We’ll post the assignments to the web at midnight on the night of July 17^th, and send out an email to all filmmakers with that information then as well. On August 17th, all movies will have to be both uploaded to the Filmmaking Frenzy website and delivered to the Alamo Drafthouse’s offices. We’ll start having screenings on Monday, August 18th, at the Alamo Ritz, and culminate everything with a Best Of screening and awards ceremony on Sunday, August 24th.

Last year’s contest was one of our personal favorites, and we can’t wait to see what people come up with this time around. Registration online is absolutely free, and we’ll have exclusive tickets for THE DARK KNIGHT midnight premiere at the Ritz available to Unnecessary Sequels participants before anyone else, so register your team today!