Other Competitions Worth Entering
Checked 2 August 2026. Deadlines move and organisers change their minds — always confirm on their site before you commit a fortnight to something.
We keep this because it seemed daft not to. If you've made something good you should be entering it everywhere it fits, and several of these have prize pools that make ours look like a rounding error. A few are genuinely excellent.
None of these are affiliated with us, nobody's paying for a listing, and we get nothing if you enter. If we've got something wrong or missed one you rate, tell us and we'll fix it.
Open right now
Astana AI Film Festival (AAIFF)
$1,000,000 · any AI tool · free to enter · closes 31.08.2026
The biggest prize in the field by a distance — $450k/$200k/$100k across a themed competition plus five $50k open awards. Three-minute minimum. Physical festival in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Worth knowing before you spend a month on it: as of early August the jury page still reads "to be announced," and we couldn't find an organiser named anywhere on the site. Free entry and real sponsors, so there's nothing obviously wrong — but go in with your eyes open.
Chroma Awards 2026
$176,500 cash + $1M in credits · 100% AI or AI-assisted · Oct 31 – Nov 30
The successor to Project Odyssey, backed by ElevenLabs, FAL, Freepik, Dreamina, CapCut and Google Cloud. Season two, and the biggest combined creative pool of the year. Online plus a London event.
Runway AIFF
$135,000+ · any AI · closes 30 September 2026
Long-running and well regarded. Part of the prize is Runway credits, which tells you the shape of it.
AI for the Future Festival
Themed deadlines · AI-engaged or thematically aligned
Run by Lisa Russell, an Emmy filmmaker and UN arts curator, with deadlines tied to global governance events. Unusually, work doesn't have to be AI-made — it can simply engage with the themes. Different flavour to everything else here.
Worth watching for the next round
The Arca Gidan Prize
~$65,000 · open-source models only (≥75%) · roughly 90 artists an edition
The closest thing to us, and the one we'd point you at first if you like the open-model constraint. Run with Banodoco, ComfyUI and Lightricks. Two editions so far, prize tiers of $8,000 / $4,000 / $1,000, and winners get flown to Paris for ADOS.
Their payouts are published and verifiable on-chain, which is more transparency than anyone else in this list offers. Genuinely good people doing a genuinely good thing.
The one difference that matters if you're here for the hardware angle: they don't restrict hardware at all. Their rule is "the requirement is on the models, not the tools" — so a rented datacenter is fine, and there are no weight classes. If a bigger prize is what you're after, go and enter theirs.
Reply AI Film Festival
€30,000 · 50%+ AI, with documentation of AI usage · Venice premiere
Third edition, backed by Reply and Mastercard. Winners get travel and accommodation to a Venice premiere. Free entry. Submissions for 2026 closed 31 May — worth watching for the next one.
Curious Refuge
$9,000–12,000 · themed rounds, several a year
The most consistent runner of small themed competitions — feel-good, horror, sketch comedy. Short formats, quick turnarounds, friendly. Note their rounds sometimes require a sponsor's tooling (a recent one required Epidemic Sound music), so read the brief.
ILLUMINATE Film Festival
$25,000 · 90-second micro-shorts · Santa Barbara
Excellent prize for a very short format, which makes it one of the better efforts-to-reward ratios going. Theme-led.
Beyond the Prompt
$10,000 · LTX Studio only · Berlin premiere
Platform-locked to LTX Studio, so not eligible work for us and vice versa — but if you already use it, it's real money for a 10–60 second film.
Regional festivals
A partial list, because there are more every month: Red Rocks (Utah), Kerala International AI Film Festival (India), Artificial Intelligence Media Festival (Los Angeles), Jeju AI International (South Korea), Bochnia (Poland), Rome AI Film Festival, K-Culture AI International (Seoul), Sparknify Human vs AI (San Francisco).
Ones that have been and gone
Worth knowing about, if only because the archives are good watching and the shape of the field explains itself once you see them.
Project Odyssey — the big one before Chroma. Season one drew 4,500 submissions and 190 hours of film at $175,000, which is still the high-water mark for entries in this space. Season three has been "coming soon" for a while, and the site still advertises a deadline from November 2025. Its momentum rolled into the Chroma Awards.
Google's Gemini award — concluded. Required films be at least 70% generated with Google's own tools, which tells you most of what you need to know about how these get funded.
Luma Dream Brief — platform-locked to Luma. Same story.
OpenArt's ComfyUI Workflow Contest — not a film competition at all: you submit the graph. Open-only by accident of format, since the deliverable is the workflow. Closest thing to a spiritual cousin of our archive, and a good one.
Civitai contests — run continuously, platform-locked, and paid in Buzz (on-site currency, roughly 1,000 to the dollar) rather than cash. Fine if you're already there.
Know one we've missed?
Tell us and we'll add it. Big or small, running or finished, weird formats especially — 48-hour races, one-shot challenges, jam-style events, anything with an interesting constraint. It doesn't have to be AI-only, and it definitely doesn't have to be like ours.
The only ones we'd hesitate over are entry-fee competitions with an anonymous organiser and no named jury. Everything else is fair game.
Where to find the rest
We're not going to out-do the people who track this full time. If you want the complete picture:
- StudioList — 47 competitions tracked with live deadlines and prize data. The best single source.
- Melies — 85+ events worldwide, with a map.
- aifilmcontests.com — filters for no-entry-fee competitions.
- AI Film Index — a deadline calendar.
- Kajimelo — a monthly-updated index kept by a working AI animation filmmaker.
One thing to check on any of them
Entry fees. Plenty of festivals charge $20–80 a submission, and it adds up fast across a slate. Everything listed above was free to enter when we checked, but confirm before you pay — and be a little suspicious of anything charging a fee with an anonymous organiser and no named jury.
That advice applies to us too. We're free, we're named, and the judges go up before signups open. Hold everyone to the same standard.