Believe it or not, the iPhone Film Festival requires that your film be shot entirely with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Many other contests make it very clear what the general restriction is for the contest, and while these confines won’t reach Android users, the work that iPhone users put in is exceptional. The real prize in any film festival is the screening of your film and being able to see those of your competitors. Prizes are still nice though, and so far, the iPhone Film Festival has awarded prizes that are valued less than $1,500, but the 2012 festival is scheduled for at least one prize at $2,000. A win here certainly offsets the cost of production, even a third place prize from the iPhone Film Festival equals the cost of an iPhone 4.

There is plenty of space for big film festival ideas if you want to push the limits to earn a win – the rules are simple and leave a lot of room for creativity. The categories are also fairly simple, including cinematography, documentary, feature, series, short film and  music video. There were five awards in each of the previous iPhone Film Festivals with cinematography and music video being the only separate categories – all other videos, feature, short, documentary, and animation competed for first, second and third. For the third iPhone Film Festival, the categories have been shuffled to join cinematography and documentary, then feature, short and series make up a second category, with music video holding up a third.  Ruben Kazantsev and Renata Rinyu are the founders of the festival and love to  focus on community. The festival is still quite young, and counting down to the appearance at MacWorld, and maybe next year’s winners will include an animated film or Siri.

If you have plans for your own entry,  Oct. 1 is the cutoff for IFF4.

With movies like Avatar and recent innovations unveiled at CES, it’s become quite obvious that the world has caught 3D fever. Unlike 3D crazes of yesteryear, the resurgence of 3D technology seems to be here for good. With new 3D products encompassing all areas of video technology, and the Blu-ray Association and HDMI Licensing announcing their 3D specifications, it was only a matter of time before 3D hardware became a reasonably priced addition to home entertainment technology.

Yesterday, Sony launched their newest product, the BDP-S470 stand-alone Blu-ray 3D-ready player. Not only does the BDP-S470 have the capability to play Blu-ray 3D content (with firmware updates that will become available this summer), but Sony has packed it full of other features as well. According to Sony’s press release, once connected to broadband Internet, the Blu-ray 3D player can “instantly stream movies, videos, music, and more from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, YouTube, Slacker Internet Radio, Pandora (Coming Spring 2010), NPR, Sony Pictures, Sony Music, and over 25 total providers through the Sony BRAVIA Internet Video platform.” And, because the iPhone has an app for everything, it also has an app for the BDP-S470. The Blu-ray 3D player can be controlled by the user’s iPhone or iPod Touch with a free app (downloaded from the Apple App Store) called “BD Remote.”

The BDP-S470 is priced surprisingly low ($200), making 3D home entertainment an affordable addition to consumer households and further perpetuating 3D fever. Have you caught it yet?

In what is said to be “the world’s first feature film to debut on mobile phones”, Sally Potter’s RAGE is being distributed in seven episodes on Babelgum. Starting at 12:01 EDT on September 21, you can begin pulling down an episode a day for a week, provided you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or Google Android-based phone.

The movie includes some big names, including Eddie Izzard, Steve Buscemi, Dame Judi Dench and Jude Law, and is an ode to the fashion industry.

We’re curious to see how it’ll do; though we think they’re shooting themselves in the foot by turning their backs on all of the other phones in captivity that can play back 3GPP video… including, hello, the BLACKBERRY?! Then again, the flipside is that this movie will be so well-received that everyone who can will be downloading it, bringing the Internet to its knees (and possibly even T-Mobile and AT&T’s 3G networks as well.)