Last Fall, Mass Animation’s Yair Landau, former president of Sony Pictures Digital, partnered with Intel on a Facebook-hosted competition to create an animated film.

The result of that competition is the 5-minute short film Live Music, which will premiere on November 20th as a short before TriStar Pictures’ film Planet 51.

Artists were invited to install a Facebook application which would allow them to download creative materials and assets, including music from guitarist Steve Vai and violinist Ann Marie Calhoun, use Maya to animate shots, and then submit them back for post production.  Three separate deadlines were used to keep content contributions coming.

The Facebook application contained a sequence viewer and classified material as Easy, Medium and Hard.

The prizing included $500 per shot used in the final cut, as well as Dell computers.  Users were invited to vote on their favorites and the Facebook community determined the winners.

Set in an instrument store, the final story follows a Rock ‘n’ Roll Guitar’s love story with a Classical Violin.  A preview for the short is below:

The film is a great case study on crowdsourcing and building content from an online community, with major sponsors attached for distribution. Is this the next new phase in Hollywood storytelling? Time will tell.