This summer, nine cities in the U.S. will field teams to compete in the Fresh Films contest, sponsored by Korean electronics giant Samsung. The local squad will get seven days, from June 22 to 28, to complete a short film, for a chance to premier their work at the American Film Institute in Hollywood.

Each city’s teams will be assigned a genre, and the St. Louis genre is “action.” The 11-person team will get props and assistance from the St. Louis branch of the Army National Guard. I suppose that means free heliciopters.

Interested teen filmmakers should hurry to www.fresh-films.com. The deadline for applying is this Sunday, May 11.

But if you miss the cutoff, there are countless other “instant film” competitions cropping up. The 48 Hour Film Project, in which competing teams get a weekend to finish a short film with an assigned genre, prop and line of dialogue, has been around since 2001 and is now held in 55 cities, including St. Louis.

There’s also the National Film Challenge, a spin-off of 48 Hour that is open to anyone in the world, and the Film Racing Tour, a 24-hour event that organizers call “improv for filmmakers.”

And in Austin, Texas, the illustrious Alamo Drafthouse brewery/cinema sponsors something called the Drunk Film Festival, for which the teams get only 12 hours to complete their movie–and have to be legally drunk.