From Blank Page to Greenlight: How To Write & Pitch Genre Scripts That Work

Most screenwriting courses teach you how to write. This one is about how to get your screenplay made.

How to write commercial genre films, find producers, pitch your projects and build a career that gets scripts made, not just finished.

For more than twenty years, we've made our living writing together. We've had five feature films produced and several animated films made. Our work has been produced independently and inside the Hollywood studio system, including projects with Blumhouse. Our films have been released theatrically around the world, including two major U.S. theatrical releases on more than 1,500 screens. We've pitched in countless rooms, travelled to Cannes year after year to meet producers, built long-term relationships across the industry, written dozens of scripts that never sold and some that did.

Everything we'll teach comes from actually doing the job, learning (sometimes the hard way) what gives a screenplay a genuine shot at becoming a film.

We'll focus on the questions that determine whether anyone ever reads your script in the first place. Essentially: What happens after you type "THE END"?

• What makes a producer stop and pay attention to a concept?
• Why do some ideas immediately attract interest while others never leave a reader’s inbox?
• How do you write a pitch that gets someone to ask for the screenplay?
• How do you pitch verbally with confidence?
• How do you find producers, approach them professionally and build relationships over time?
• Do you need an agent? And if you don't have one, what should you do instead?

We'll walk you through the complete process and share the strategies, mistakes, shortcuts and lessons we've learned from developing projects in Australia and internationally. There’ll also be an opportunity to pitch your ideas and get feedback on viability, where you could take them and who you could pitch them to.

We'll also be honest about the realities of the industry. It's tricky. But it isn't mysterious.

Here's something else worth knowing. There was nothing particularly special about us.

We grew up in the same working-class Queensland country town. We didn't have family in the film industry. We didn't know producers. We didn't have agents opening doors for us or funding agencies welcoming us with open arms (at the time, as genre writers, it was if anything almost the opposite). We started with every excuse not to make it. We had to figure it out ourselves. Now, we want to give others what nobody gave us – the inside word and a helping, guiding hand…

That's what this course is about.

If you want practical, honest advice from working screenwriters who are actively developing, writing and producing projects...

Join us for two days of conversation, Q&A and networking and socialising with other likeminded writers and we'll show you the approach that's helped us get movies produced. And the one we're still using today.

See you there.

Shayne & S.P.