Yahoo has enlisted a cast of all-star celebrities, media giants, and members of the business sector to help judge a video contest being undertaken by Film Your Issue, Yahoo, and Jumpcut.  In a post to the Yahoo Anecdotal blog, Mike and Steve from Jumpcut, a video sharing and editing site, talk about their experiences at the Sundance Film Festival promoting and talking about the contest.

Film Your Issue invites young adults between the ages of 16 - 25 to create 60 second movies about issues that they're passionate about.  Issues can be global, local, regional, or subject-specific in nature.  These user-submitted videos will start appearing on the site today and will be screened by a long list of people in the know:  Terry Semel, Walter Cronkite, Brian Williams, John Cusack, Kevin Bacon, Wolf Blitzer, and Peter Jackson are specifically mentioned in the blog post.  The Film Your Issue website contains a complete list that includes heads of a number of movie, television, and media companies, leaders in many fields surrounding current issues, and media well-knowns.

In addition to raising awareness on current pressing issues, the partnership will no doubt help Yahoo plug its video services, which include Jumpcut.  It's a pretty interesting way to put CGM and online video to work.  The more exposure to creating, editing, and submitting online video that people have, the more they start searching out and watching the videos of others.  And I'm sure Yahoo is hoping to get some of that visitor traffic.

If you've got an issue that you'd like to share, head on over to Film Your Issue and take a look at the competition.