Well heck! It’s almost September, so time for a rundown of the past few months.
The Morning After
While my short film The Morning After has pretty much done its festival year, we were invited to enter the #SocialShortsAwards run by AFI/AACTA. It’s still available to watch there til September 1, I believe, at www.socialshorts.com.au/drama – and we got to top 4 of the audience awards!
I’ll be putting it up to view publicly shortly on the official website wwww.themorningaftersiemreap.com
Remote Access
Following its win at the Girl Power Film + Media Summit earlier this year, Remote Access is an official selection of, and will be screening at, the Detroit SheTown International Film Festival in September!
Yep, in 2 weeks I’ll be flying over to see it on the big screen again, along with a bunch of great films from other female filmmakers. My first short, The Morning After, screened last year, but I was unable to attend as I was in Long Beach watching it at the CambodiaTown Film Festival – where Angelina Jolie made an appearance!
At 20 minutes long, it’s a harder proposition to make it into film festivals, so we are thrilled to see it get some festival love, and hope it educates more people about the dangers of cyberdoxxing/online abuse. I’ll be at a Q & A session, so come on down, Detroiters and ask away!
- For great advice on dealing with online abuse, check out Zoe Quinn‘s Crash Override site – it’s a wealth of information.
Amok
I have written a feature script called Amok, developed from The Morning After – which is the first of a number of interconnected stories set in Siem Reap that make up the film. The film is multi-protagonist and non-linear (that is, has a number of different time frames and POV’s), so is quite a challenge for my first feature script – but what the hey, write what you love, right?
While it definitely needs more drafts, Amok has got to:
- the finals of the Creative World Awards,
- the semi-finals of the Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship (my sitcom Disbos also got to the semis, and Diversion got to the quarter-finals),
- the semis of the Cinestory Feature Retreat & Fellowship Competition (more on that below),
- the semis of the Diverse Voices screenwriting comp, and
- the quarter-finals of the PAGE Awards!
Amok is now sitting on a score of 473 on Coverfly, putting it at #7 of the Thriller feature scripts for this month.
As a result of the Cinestory semi-placing, I am now attending the Cinestory Feature Retreat in Idyllwild in October! So, yes, another short visit to the US in between working to pay for it all! Looking forward to workshopping/rewriting under the mentorship of industry peeps – I’ve been told by a few screenwriter friends that they found their time there invaluable.
In other Amok news, I got a really fantastic 7 pages of PAGE feedback that has energised me to get cracking on the next draft, fix those problems, deepen those characters and their backstories, show rather than tell, build to a crescendo of an ending…and get funding. Yes, finally I am going to apply for Screen Australia development funding – wish me luck!