Creative District LaunchTechnicolor's latest endeavor isn't a picture profile for your camera, but an online profile for your career. While many professional networks already exist for filmmakers, the backbone of Creative District is in its grant program, offering monthly grants (to U.S. residents) of $5,000 to projects in every stage of production. Click through to read more about Creative District and see if the social network might be in your future.


Creative District just launched today (though it's still in Beta), and it's an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing web experience. However, my question is: how are the grants chosen? Is it just a good marketing stunt? Currently users only have 300 characters to describe your project in the grant application. Those better be some convincing words.

Creative District control Panel

Creative District's General Manager Micki Krimmel has this to say about the platform:

Creative projects require a different approach to securing talent. Creative workers jump from project to project and often discover opportunities through word of mouth or social networks. Creative District provides a place to display their portfolio of work, find the best collaborators to help complete their projects, build their network, and take their careers and work to the next level.

Creative District Open Positions

In its current iteration, it's basically a search engine for projects with simple but elegant filmmaker profiles behind them. Therefore a project becomes the basis for an online interaction, much like your Stage32 or ProductionHub.

Creative District most notably provided a grant to the Fort Tilden filmmakers, who won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's SXSW, to help them finish in time for the festival. Directly from the Fort Tilden producer, Mollye Asher:

Now, with the support of Creative District, we can jump full steam ahead into the final stages of making Fort Tilden the film we always wanted it to be! The grant we have received will go directly into helping finish the sound mix, color correction and music licensing of the film.

Fort Tilden Wins Creative District Grant

The real barometer to any social network for me is the quality of its members, and so far on launch day I'm seeing a decent cross-section of good filmmakers on here. More tools for us! I encourage you to go through their easy sign up process and explore a bit, you find might some future collaborators.

Will you use Creative District to find collaborators or apply for their grant? Let us know your impressions in the comments below.

Links: