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Mountain Dew's Green Label Open Studios: Open Call Winner Launches Film

Mountain Dew has chosen the winner of a content campaign centering on young film makers looking for a spotlight.

The partnership, Green Label Studios: Open Call, under its Green Label art and lifestyle platform, launched last year and involved outsider film maker Robert Rodriguez. It rewarded 10 movie-camera wielding combatants, who submitted short films that had to more or less double as youth-focused long-form ads for Mountain Dew, under its “Do the Dew” banner. 

The 10, chosen by a Mountain Dew panel from among all of the contest submissions, each got a $10,000 production grant to make a piece of content for the soda brand. Then in New York last summer they showed their films down in Soho, where judging took place. The winner got a $250,000 production grant to make a film for Green-Label.com and mentorship by Rodriguez and Roberto Orci, executive producer and writer of the TV series "Matador." Mountain Dew got the content, product placement and branding in the films.  

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The PepsiCo unit has released the winning movie, by Nathan Balli. The 2:47 film, “Arctic Surf,” follows the exploits of a pair of madmen who enjoy surfing in Alaska. The film follows their adventures, including the trip via charter plane and fishing vessel to the remote, gelid location, the stunning half-moon Aialik Bay flanked by snow-dappled mountains. A rep for the PepsiCo unit says that as of now, the content will just live on the Mountain Dew YouTube page; there are no plans to put any of it into advertising.

Mountain Dew also launched a program called Green Label Sound: Open Call at the end of last year, which was a national search for the next up-and-coming musical talent, with Kelechi being named the winner. But way back in 2011 the company got into the record-label business, producing its first full-length record, the debut of rap duo Cool Kids’ When Fish Ride Bicycles under the Green Label Sound label. The spokesperson says the brand is looking to continually expand the original Open Call program to different relevant verticals, including more in music.

Lots of brands are getting or have gotten into the music act either with record labels, or more commonly content curation (Honda Stage among them): there’s Converse’s Rubber Tracks label, and Toyota’s “youth” brand Scion, which got into the record mix  back in 2005 with Scion A/V.
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