Salt Lake filmmaker wins prize from Mountain Dew

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A Salt Lake City filmmaker has shown he can "Do the Dew" — and earned $250,000 for it.

Nathan Balli won the first Green Label Studios: Open Call, a filmmaking contest sponsored by Mountain Dew, the company announced Thursday.

Balli was one of nine finalist chosen from hundreds of video submissions. Each finalist was given $10,000 to produce a short film for Mountain Dew's Green Label Studios.

Balli's film, "Authenticity Is Everything," features young people doing cool things: standing on moving motorcycles on a rural Utah road, playing video games projected on a building behind Exchange Place, wakeboarding in the pond under the I-15 "spaghetti bowl" and so on.

"We saw a tremendous amount of passion and some incredible content from all of the finalists, but Nathan's project really stood out," said Greg Lyons, vice president of marketing for Mountain Dew, in a statement.

Balli's prize is a $250,000 production grant to make content for Green Label Studios, which includes mentorship from director Robert Rodriguez ("Sin City," "Spy Kids") and writer Roberto Orci ("Transformers," "Star Trek").

Watch Balli's winning video, and see him receiving the news that he won, in the video above.