Screen Australia and the Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) have announced applications are open for The Creators program. Now in its second year, The Creators is a career acceleration program for high-calibre, mid-career screenwriters to build toward the creation of their own shows. Through the program, up to six writers with existing episodic slates will be selected to travel…
Continue readingIt’s unfathomable to me that I’m writing this. That someone with such vivid, dynamic talent – whose ideas and stories felt limitless and unbounded by the laws of nature – might no longer be with us. “What do we want to see next?” was a regular question Alison asked when we were deciding on the…
Continue readingJames Davern died this week. I’m sorry, I don’t use euphemisms; I don’t think he was too keen on them either. He was my friend and mentor for nearly sixty years, and I will miss him greatly. As will his beloved family and so many, many others. Larger than life, that was Jim. Renaissance man,…
Continue readingWhen screenwriter Rhianna Malezer won the short form Monte Miller Award with her script The Stockman, her feelings about winning doubled as brilliant writing advice: ‘The story flowed directly from my spirit. It’s very affirming to know how much more impactful my work can be when I am true to my own voice.’ When did…
Continue readingMaxine Mellor is an award-winning playwright and teaching artist. In 2022, she received the David Williamson Prize for Playwriting and the AWGIE Award for Best Original Stage Play for ‘Horizon’ with Playlab Theatre. Her work has been performed nationally and internationally and is published by Playlab Press and Australian Plays Transform. When did you first realise you wanted to…
Continue readingScreenwriters Jane Jago and Kayti Murphy have been announced as the winners of the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Monte Miller Awards, the premier awards for unproduced scripts in Australia. Returning to Melbourne for the first time in three years, the Awards were announced to a packed room of buzzing industry decision-makers, producers and Guild members, who spent the evening…
Continue readingJames Cripps received the long form Monte Miller Award last year for his series High Rotation, and since then has worked on the upcoming NCIS: Sydney and been a finalist in the 2021 AACTA Pitch: Bite competition. When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?I was in Year 7 and I thought it was time to decide…
Continue readingThe Australian Writers’ Guild has taken a firm stand against the unregulated use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Australia’s creative industries, issuing a position paper outlining the imminent threat posed by AI and an extensive framework for the appropriate regulation of its use to protect workers and audiences. As the world learns that the Writers…
Continue readingEarlier this week, the Atlantic published a search tool that allowed authors to search for their books in a dataset that has been used to train generative-AI systems. The search tool can be accessed here. The dataset – ‘Books3’ – contains approximately 183,000 pirated books, plays and other literary works. Generative AI systems have been developed or trained by scraping, or…
Continue readingThe Australian Writers’ Guild has taken a firm stand against the unregulated use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Australia’s creative industries, issuing a position paper outlining the imminent threat posed by AI and an extensive framework for the appropriate regulation of its use to protect workers and audiences. As the world learns that the Writers…
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