Ac­cord­ing to new fig­ures from Amer­i­can mar­ket re­search com­pa­ny eMar­keter, the num­ber of smart­phone users in the world will sur­pass two bil­lion in 2016.

Tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances have there­fore placed video cam­eras in the hands of men and women, who at times have cap­tured sto­ries that are shared by mil­lions through so­cial me­dia. This wave has birthed a new crop of po­ten­tial film mak­ers. The glob­al film in­dus­try has tak­en no­tice and so has the T&T Film Com­pa­ny (FilmTT). FilmTT there­fore launched the sec­ond an­nu­al Smart­phone Film Fes­ti­val on May 27.

A new glob­al trend, this com­pe­ti­tion is a tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ty for smart­phone users to en­joy­ably dis­cov­er their hid­den and of­ten over­looked tal­ents with­in their video cap­tures.

A re­lease from FilmTT said the or­gan­i­sa­tion seeks to de­vel­op this in­trin­sic ca­pac­i­ty with­in the coun­try, and has part­nered with Knowl­ed­geTT to en­gage and ed­u­cate all in­ter­est­ed par­tic­i­pants on in­ter­na­tion­al­ly stan­dard­ised film­mak­ing tech­niques with free ac­cess to their on­line re­sources.

Part­ner­ing with Blink bmo­bile and Sam­sung for this com­pe­ti­tion, mem­bers of the pub­lic are in­vit­ed to sub­mit five-minute short films, pro­duced us­ing on­ly smart­phone/mo­bile de­vice tech­nol­o­gy.

Among oth­er prizes, the win­ners will al­so have their films sub­mit­ted in­to the Toron­to and Tokyo Smart­phone Film Fes­ti­vals, two of the largest smart­phone fes­ti­vals world­wide. The ex­port of such lo­cal tal­ent, in keep­ing with FilmTT's man­date, opens the door to a new mar­ket for non-tra­di­tion­al, trendy film­mak­ers with the pow­er of smart­phones and the eye for cap­tur­ing imag­i­na­tion.

There are no au­di­ence or age re­stric­tions, any­one with a smart­phone can par­tic­i­pate. The dead­line for sub­mis­sion is Ju­ly 2015 and the cam­paign be­gins on May 30. In­for­ma­tion will be ac­ces­si­ble through ra­dio, press and so­cial me­dia ad­ver­tis­ing.

Film TT is a sub­sidiary of Cre­ativeTT and is fo­cused on fa­cil­i­tat­ing the eco­nom­ic ex­pan­sion of the in­dus­try as well as the de­vel­op­ment of ex­port po­ten­tial for lo­cal­ly de­vel­oped con­tent, a re­lease said.