Thursday, February 24, 2011

I don't know how many of you have been submitting to the various Telefilm Canada writer-only programs like Feature It! and Writers First and the Premier Writers Program, but I had an enlightening back-and-forth with a friend at Telefilm. You can only submit a project to Telefilm at a given level (e.g. outline, treatment, first draft, second draft) once.

This gets a bit dicey because the objectives of some of these programs are different. Feature It! was aimed at emerging writers doing low budget stories. Feature It! could have rejected a project for being too high budget or the writer not being "emerging" enough; but the project is then tainted at TFC unless you take it to the next level. (I.e. you turn your outline into a treatment, or your treatment into a draft.)

The requirements are a little looser when producers get involved. If Producer A is rejected with your outline, you can come in later with Producer B, so long as you've made serious changes to the material -- which, with a new producer, you probably have.

I'm passing all this along 'cause I was not aware of it! Careful what you send in and how -- you only get one shot.

Labels: free money

10:26 AM

1 Comments:

Yeah, you can also get punted from the Premier writers program for not being Premier enough. Just had a conversation with them about how being a staff writer on a Fox show for 13 episodes doesn't equate to being a writer with 10 hours of produced TV credits. I take their point, and they were really nice about it, but it makes me wonder who's going to make it in to this program? The Big Dogs out there don't need the concept to treatment bump, and the little ones have their own programs.

By  s.hungwell, at 1:51 PM  

Post a Comment

Back to Complications Ensue main blog page.