Taking advantage of both his own technical abilities and those of his enthusiastic and large fanbase, writer/director John August is currently holding a trailer competition for his new film The Nines. The competition began on September 29th and will end on the 25th.

John has made select footage from the film available for participants to edit, in both DV and MPEG-4 formats.

Tantamount to user-generated fan content, the final products will be an interesting mashup of users’ own style and a commercial product. While not entirely user-created content, the competition is all about the ability and desire for regular users and viewers to participate in the media conversation. “It doesn’t matter who you are, or whether you’ve seen The Nines yet. If you have a good idea (and/or mad editing skillz), you should compete.”

John’s showing impressive knowledge and foresight, aware that making your audience feel that they’re actually part of the process of a film will make them far more eager to part with their dollars when the movie’s released in cinemas and onto store shelves.

And the competition’s not just for a regular movie trailer, either. While the first category that trailers can be made for is Best Pure Trailer, the second is Best Mashup Trailer. For this category, creators will be splicing in content from other films and videos. “If you want to grab the nuclear explosion from The Sum of All Fears, go for it.”

We’ll have to wait and see how YouTube responds to the content grabbed from copyrighted sources, but John doesn’t imagine there will be any serious issues. “This isn’t an invitation for flagrant copyright violation, but rather an urge to explore the boundaries of creative fair use. There’s no commercial aspect to any part of this competition, and if YouTube (or whoever) lets you post it, that’s good enough for our purposes.”

Competition rules are here, and here’s the FAQ with a sample trailer by John August.