Congratulations to 12 Princesses and Origin of a Species, the projects selected today by a panel of top industry judges to receive Annual Awards totaling $1.1 million from Amazon Studios, the movie-development arm of Amazon.com.

“It has been an exciting year for Amazon Studios. We received projects from all over the world and have enjoyed collaborating with filmmakers and screenwriters to develop their original stories,” said Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios. “Choosing the best test movie and the best script was extremely challenging; with thousands of projects submitted it was difficult to recognize only two.”

The $1 million Best Test Movie Award went to 12 Princesses, the musical tale of a farmboy who risks his heart (and his life) to discover how royal sisters escape each night from the imprisonment of their mad father. Rob Gardner of Mesa, Ariz., wrote and directed the test movie, based on his stage musical version of the Grimm fairy tale of “The 12 Dancing Princesses.”

“It was really well received and, since then, I’ve felt like it would make a great film,” Gardner said. “When I heard about the Amazon Studios contest on NPR, it sounded like the perfect avenue to try to get such a movie made.”

12 Princesses and other top Amazon Studios test movies are available to download or stream for free at the Amazon Studios site, and at Amazon Instant Video.

The $100,000 Best Script Award went to Origin of a Species, the story of a former police officer whose German Shepherds are infected with rabies and terrorize a small, Midwestern community. Brooklyn-based screenwriter Matthew Gossett said his story has roots in reality: “I used to work with a guy in Cincinnati who was embroiled in a property line dispute with his elderly neighbor, and as their confrontations escalated, I wondered what would happen if chaos erupted. This screenplay is about chaos fed by humans and set loose upon a town.”

Annual Awards judges included Lawrence Bender (producer, Inglourious Basterds), Akiva Goldsman (writer, A Beautiful Mind), Trevor Groth (director of programming, Sundance Film Festival), Alexander Payne (writer/director The Descendants) and Courtenay Valenti (Executive Vice President of Production, Warner Bros. Pictures).

More than 7,000 scripts and 700 test movies have been submitted to Amazon Studios since its launch in November 2010. And in the past year, dozens of scripts, test movies and trailers have been awarded nearly $2 million.