The start of this year’s NFL season is still 3 months away but this morning at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, Chevrolet announced they would be airing 5 commercials during Super Bowl XLVI in February…and one of those ads will be a 30 to 60 second long, consumer-generated “short film” about the spirit of the open road.  So get ready folks because Chevy is “Crashing” the 2012 Super Bowl!

But unlike Doritos’ annual “Crash the Superbowl” contest, Chevy will not be running this promotion themselves.  Instead, the Chevy competition will be hosted and run by the video contest website,  Mofilm.  In fact, this morning’s big announcement was made at the Mofilm seminar in Cannes.

Surprisingly, this is going to be  a GLOBAL video contest so you don’t need to be a US citizen to enter.  The contest will be run in two stages; the Script phase and the Video phase.  You have the option of submitting to either or both phases.  So if you don’t submit a script, you can still shoot a video.  Here’s what Mofilm and Chevy are asking screenwriters to do:

The script for your film should be an epic road trip story or adventure that captures the spirit of Route 66 and Chevrolet! The top five scripts will win serious cash. We will provide feedback on all scripts which will give you a jump start should you decide to produce a video in Round Two.

Yes, you read that correctly.  The sponsors will give feedback on ALL scripts that are submitted.  That’s huge!  It means that anyone who submits to the script phase will have a tremendous advantage when it comes time to shoot their video.  There are 5 cash prizes in the script competition ranging from $1,000 to $5,000.  Once the script competition ends, a new contest brief for the Video Phase will be launched on September 1st.

If your entry is selected as the winner of the Video Phase, your short will air during the Super Bowl and you’ll receive $25,000.  And while this hasn’t been officially announced yet, the folks at Mofilm tell me that the winner will also get a trip to the Big Game.

So how the heck do you win?  Well, the winners will be picked by a mix of public voting and judge’s decisions. However, Joel Ewanick, global chief marketing officer at General Motors told The New York Times that while votes will “have a great deal of influence,” the “final say” will be his.  So I think we need to wait for the official rules before we know how the winners will actually be chosen.  But I’m very glad to hear that votes alone will not determine the winner.

All of this is really exciting news.  Last year, Pepsi Max and Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest recived more than 5,000 entries and they aired 6 user-made ads.  Getting something to air during the SuperBowl would be an amazing accomplishment but a 6 in 5,000 shot aren’t very appealing odds.  So if you’re going to enter one HUGE video contest this year, “Route 66″ might be your best bet.  I personally am going to make the Chevy Super Bowl contest my top priority for the second half of 2011.  The deadline to enter is December 1st but I think I’m going to get to work on this ASAP.  The contest was literally just announced like an hour ago so not all of the pertinent info is up on the site yet. But if you want to get a jump on the competition, follow the link below:

Chevrolet Route 66: Super Bowl competition: http://www.mofilm.com/chevroletroute66