The Telus Storyhive music video grant contest is accepting submissions, and aspiring musicians and filmmakers have until April 27 to submit their entries in order to be considered for the grant. So far Fort MacMurray resident John Dough has managed to snatch two of the previous grants awarded in past years. Musicians are encouraged to partner with their chosen filmmaker in order to create a video for submission. During May the community will be given a chance to vote for the video submission that they like the best, and this voting will be used to narrow the list of contestants down to a small number of entries. Every team that is shortlisted will get a $10,000 grant to create a music video for consideration.

After the initial video creation and submission for the music video grant Storyhive will select two submissions from each province to receive an additional $30,000 grant to produce a second video as well. Telus Director of Content Prem Gill said “We’re engaging with community members to help support local talent … and really supporting people in this environment we’ve created, in helping them build their profiles, create awareness (and) get them thinking about how you actually build audiences, both from the film side and the music side. We give where we live. This is a great way for us to drive innovation, support local content in a non-traditional way … to support the current generation of people who are much more digitally savvy and focused. We don’t expect people like Nickleback applying for this because it’s a $10,000 grant. Most the bands are probably unsigned, and the same goes for the filmmaker side.”