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Launched yesterday at SPA’s Screen Forever conference, the portal is already showcasing over 80 original projects and dozens of Australia’s best screenwriters.
‘Opportunities for industry professionals to make so many new professional connections, like they can at Screen Forever, are few and far between – the new Pathways portal provides a permanent platform for producers to find and connect with premier Australian screenwriters, high-quality, peer-reviewed scripts, and exciting new projects,’ AWG Group CEO Jacqueline Elaine told ArtsHub.
‘Producers domestically and internationally are on the hunt for screenwriting talent, but they can’t necessarily find or read thousands of scripts a year. The AWG has the benefit of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of experienced writers reviewing and shortlisting a huge diversity of projects from all across the country.’
‘We wanted to harness that wealth of talent and opportunity and take it out to the marketplace,’ said Elaine.
The outcome is an online tool which bridges the gap between producers and screenwriters, hosting a continuously updating selection of unproduced scripts and giving them greater exposure than ever before.
‘Everybody wins when great scripts and writers are connecting with great producers.’
REAL FACES BEHIND THE INTERFACE
The process of developing the new portal began organically, as an evolution of the earlier Pathways Program, which showcased competition-winning scripts from AWG members. The new Pathways portal goes beyond this, providing a resource for the entire industry and showcasing Australian screenwriters and their as yet unproduced project ideas and scripts to the world. The new interface is sleek and navigating your way around the portal is simple.
The new portal has two main hubs: Prime is where you’ll find premier Australian screenwriters such as Justin Monjo, Shelley Birse and Rob Connolly, while Showcase is the hub for unproduced screenplays by both credited and emerging talents. Already, numerous Showcase scripts have been optioned, including Lucid by Philip Tarl Denison (now in production) and Matt Wheeldon’s Sleepwalker (now in development).
Across the site, screenplays can be searched for by project type (e.g. feature film or television), by genre and by screenwriter.
A BETTER WAY TO FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR
It wasn’t only the hunger for more diverse content that fuelled the idea for Pathways, but also the need to create better opportunities for producers to discover writers.
‘A lot of competitions are focussed on one winner. What the winning writer may get is a couple of grand, a couple of press releases, then nothing happens,’ explains AWG’s Pathways Manager Susie Hamilton.
‘For example, there might be a romantic comedy screenwriting competition. The person with the most talent might actually be a brilliant comedy writer, but they didn’t really nail the romance – so they don’t win that competition and the industry loses the opportunity to hear about that project.
‘The new Pathways Showcase has resulted from us opening up our ways of identifying of the hottest scripts and the best screenwriters and making them visible to the industry,’ Hamilton says.
‘We want to see high-quality productions based on quality scripts. We want to help the industry, internationally and locally, be able to find that talent,’ Hamilton concluded.
Visit www.awgpathways.com.au to register to access quality projects now.
