Your submissions to our Horror Award terrified us; they’re brining us warmth and laughter in our Romance and Comedy Award. Now it’s time to transport us to strange new worlds in the WriteMovies Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award, which opens today!
Hot on the heels of winning our last Grand Prize Contest, Vanisha Renée Pierce has won our Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award with her script EZEKIEL – and to celebrate and give you insights into winning our contests, WriteMovies is doing an exclusive interview with her which you can watch for FREE!
If you missed the deadline for the WriteMovies Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award, there’s no need to travel back in time – we’ve extended the contest for another week, giving you until May 16th to enter!
The final deadline for the WriteMovies Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award is in just one week on May 9th! Don’t forget to enter for your chance to win great prizes – as well as getting FREE, automatic entry to our Spring Contest and the chance to win the Grand Prize of $3500!
As tomorrow is May 4th – also known as Star Wars Day! – we look to celebrate the most successful sci-fi franchise of all time (sorry Trekkies!).
Since the release of STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE in 1977, the Star Wars universe has expanded across every medium of storytelling. With games, books, TV shows, spin-offs and sequels, even the most dedicated fan struggles to keep up with the vast number of stories.
For writers, the STAR WARS universe represents the potential of your IP. The sci-fi and fantasy genres are arguably the most successful for building large franchises and extended universes, probably because of the freedom the writer has in creating the setting and sheer level of imagination involved; the lore of these worlds gives the writer extra tools to tell their story, which can itself end up captivating audiences.
However, this can also pose risks to the structure of the story. Imagine if A NEW HOPE had opened by introducing us to all the complex politics, history, and technology of a galaxy far, far away. It would a total snooze-fest, right? Instead, it uses its lore to enhance the story, focusing instead on the Hero’s Journey of Luke Skywalker and only explaining the minimum we need to know.
The key to a great sci-fi and fantasy script is creating a fascinating world for the characters to inhabit without losing focus on the story at heart.
Have you written the next STAR WARS? Have you come up with a fantastical world for audiences to fall in love with? Enter the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award by the deadline on May 9th before it’s too late!
With the WriteMovies Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award well underway, we know many of you will be working to get your scripts finished by the final deadline on May 9th. So, to help you on your way, here’s our advice for writing sci-fi and fantasy dialogue…
The standard deadline for both the WriteMovies Spring Contest and our Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award is in just one week on Sunday April 11th! As the world tries to get back to normal, producers are looking for scripts that could tempt audiences back into movie theatres. Could one of those script be yours?
There’s been plenty of positive news for the movie industry over the last couple of weeks. GODZILLA VS. KONG has set a pandemic record, taking $48.5 million at the box office – a clear sign that people are eager to get back to the cinema and that sci-fi and fantasy will continue to be strong performers.
Other genres are seeing investment too. There’s been recent news that Netflix are making a $400 million deal for two sequels to Rian Johnson’s KNIVES OUT, with the first due to start shooting as soon as June. This shows that original IPs are still sought after by producers, and that successful franchises don’t have to be built around aliens and magic!
All the news coming out of industry indicates that it’s getting back on its feet. Audiences are eager for content and producers are investing in new projects and scripts for future productions.
We’ll be pitching all of our winners – of both the Spring Contest and the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award – to industry. This is the right time to be getting your script out there, and submitting to our competitions is the perfect way to do it! We also provide Development Notes to all our winners, making sure that it’s pitch perfect and giving it the best chance of success.
Enter by the standard deadline on Sunday and you’ll save $10 on your submission. What are you waiting for? Submit your script to be in with a chance of winning some great prizes, including our $3500 Grand Prize – click HERE to see the full list of prizes and enter the Spring Contest, or click HERE for the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award!
Worldbuilding is a key component of genre fiction, and with the new WriteMovies Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award now open, a lot of you will now be hard at work creating new worlds! But how do you do it successfully? Here are what we see as the first principles of great worldbuilding.
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