Jay, my partner on Pixelodeon, sent over this link yesterday. It's for YouTube's new Project:Direct contest.

Now, I don't really have any gripes with YouTube holding a contest that helps independent filmmakers. But I do have a rather serious problem with the way they are branding their contest. Just take a look at these two pages by clicking the thumbnails below:

This is not cool.

Further, the video intro they are using is very similar to the one that preceeded every screening at Pixelodeon and preceeds a number of videos created at the event for the Pixelodeon website. For comparison, the YouTube video is embedded first, then the Pixelodeon video underneath:

Now, the carnival-like pinwheel image we used for Pixelodeon in the background was from a stock image available on iStockPhoto.com, so it's not exactly rare. But I find it hard to believe that the YouTube designers were not aware of Pixelodeon, since we had a number of prominent YouTubers attend, and in fact we had an entire screening dedicated to YouTube (embedded above).

We created a strong brand, and YouTube appears to be "borrowing" concepts that can potentially create confusion between the two events. The chances are very remote that this is a coincidence. They even have a film projector "flicker" and grain imposed over their pinwheel video clip like the one Ryan Junell created for us for Pixelodeon.

I'll update this post when we figure out what we're going to do about it. Zadi has already reached out to YouTube to try and get some answers.