IMDb’s Contribution to Shorts
Want to get your short film script made? Bath Film Festival makes this and an IMDb New Filmmaker Award available.
Bath Film Festival’s 28th film festival will be 1–11 November 2018.
Though it is closed for 2018 submissions, the idea behind the IMDb Script to Screen Award is simple: anyone can submit a script for a short film with a running time of 10 minutes or under. Entries are then read and discussed by a panel from the creative writing team at Bath Spa University.
Five scripts are shortlisted and performed in June by Bath Spa’s drama students in front of our industry judges and a live audience. Both the judges and the audience vote for the best script and the winner receives £5000 cash and £1000 worth of hire kit from Visual Impact (UK filmmakers only) to turn their script into a film. Plus, the winner receives a coveted IMDb Enamel Badge and prestigious glass-etched award. The winning film is not only screened at FilmBath Festival but at several other film festivals across the country.
Bath Film Festival’s IMDb Script to Screen Award reaches its final stage with an audience and jury vote on which of five acted scripts deserves the top prize of a £5k production budget, free kit hire and a festival premiere.
Film fans will gain new insight into what makes a script makeable when Bath Film Festival invites the public to join industry experts in picking the winner of the screenwriting competition it runs with the world’s most visited movie websites — IMDb.
Only five scripts out of an international entry of nearly 100 now remain in contention for the festival’s latest IMDb Script to Screen Award for which the top prize is a £5,000 production budget, £1,000 worth of kit hire, a trophy and a premiere slot for the finished short.
The winner will be chosen following a rehearsed reading of each shortlisted script at Komedia, Westgate Street, Bath, by way of a vote that will involve the audience as well as the competition’s official jury — IMDb founder and CEO, Col Needham; BAFTA nominated film editor Una Ni Dhonghaile; Kate Leys, script editor and developer whose commissions include Trainspotting, Four Weddings and a Funeral and East is East, and Olivia Hetreed, a multiple award-winning scriptwriter and the current President of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Bath Film Festival producer Holly Tarquini says: “The rehearsed readings by actors make the finals night of our IMDb Script to Screen Award an essential date for everyone interested in what makes some scripts stand out enough to get made. It is also a great opportunity for film enthusiasts to test how good they are at talent spotting and to hear from our expert judges about how their careers started and what they’ve done since.”
Tickets for the finals of Bath Film Festival’s IMDb Script to Screen Award are on sale now, priced at £5 (£3 concessions). To book, visit the Bath Film Festival website — www.bathfilmfestival.org.uk– or contact Bath Box Office on 01225 463 362.
The finalists are Steve Brehm with a rom-com titled TIMING; Carolyn Goodyear with a comedy set in a GP’s surgery LEMON SHERBET; Karen Anstee with a romantic fantasy APPROVAL NEEDED; Kulvinder Gill with a mystery thriller FEMME FATALE and Anita Ross with a fantasy drama THE WITCH’S HANDBOOK.
[Please see Notes for more info about shortlist]
Bath Film Festival wishes to thank IMDb and GWR for its support for this competition.
- IMDb Script to Screen Award
- IMDb New Filmmaker Award
- Submissions
- IMDb Script to Screen Rules
- IMDb New Filmmaker Award Rules
Deadlines and dates for 2018
Earlybird — £10–4 April 2018
Regular — £15/£10–18 May 2018
Gala final at Komedia, Bath — 20 June 2018
Premiere screening of winning film — 6 Nov 2018
Read the IMDb Script to Screen Award Rules here.
Submissions ONLY via Withoutabox (please do NOT ask for a fee waiver, thank you)
