WHEN IN ROHM – Winter Contest Grand Prize Winner!
The winner of our Winter Contest is an action-packed cyberpunk epic, chronicling William Shakespeare’s interpretation of the rise and fall of ancient Rome: WHEN IN ROHM by Vanisha Renée Pierce!
REVELATIONS – Winter Contest 2nd Place Winner!
Second place in our Winter Contest went to a gripping sci-fi TV pilot in which mysterious events put the International Space Station in danger and change the very face of reality: REVELATIONS by Johnny Gilligan!
Spring Contest and Genre Award – Standard Deadline in 1 week!
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!
END OF LINE by Paul Howard Hunt – Q&A with our 3rd Place winner!
Want to find out what it takes to be one of our winners? Check out this Q&A with Paul Howard Hunt, who took 3rd place in our Winter Contest and won our Romance and Comedy Award, for insights into how he writes, where his inspiration comes from, and his tips for writers!
1 Year Ago… Looking back at the past year for WriteMovies
A year ago, we gave you a sneak peek at the industry diary of our director, Ian Kennedy, as he pitched our winners projects in Los Angeles. Now, as we start a new pitching push, we look back at a year like no other and how it’s shaped our plans for the future.
Winter 2021 Screenwriting Contest – Winners Announced!
It’s time for our Winter Contest to come to an end with a brand new set of winners! Our deserving Grand Prize winner walks away with $3500, and the top three all receive pitching to industry, script development, and more.
Writing Insights – First Principles of Worldbuilding
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.
- Create something unique. There’s nothing wrong with writing a traditional sci-fi or fantasy story, but there needs to be something special about it we haven’t seen before. Even just one unique element can be enough – as long as you build the rest of the world around it and maximize its potential.
- Go deep… but not too deep. The real world is a complex place, and fictional worlds need to be complex too. Otherwise we won’t believe in them! However, you also need to know when to streamline and simplify things. Throw too many ideas at your audience, and they’re just going to get confused and lose track of everything.
- Avoid exposition. You might be eager to share every last detail about your world, but don’t do it through clunky, unnatural exposition. Instead, incorporate visuals that explain your concepts – and consider whether your audience even needs to know it all. Above all else, avoid the dreaded “infodump” that overwhelms us with information all at once.
- Use the world in your narrative. Your world is part of your story just as much as the characters, plot points, and dialogue. Everything in it should therefore help tell the story by actively participating in it. It’s not just a backdrop – treat it like a character in itself!
- Don’t break your own rules. Reality has rules you can’t break; they’re called physics. Your fictional world needs rules too, even if it includes magic or highly advanced technology. And magic should abide by those rules, not be used to break them! If you do, you’ll also be breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
There you have it – our first principles of great worldbuilding. Enter the WriteMovies Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award when your worlds are ready, and show us somewhere we’ve never seen before! There are great prizes on offer, and you also get free, automatic entry to the Spring Screenwriting Contest!
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