4 posts tagged awards

Amazon Studios is adding Best Actor awards to celebrate the work of performers in test movies and dialogue tracks. Two awards of $1,000 will be given monthly, starting with September contests. Test movies are inexpensive, full-length visualizations of scripts and dialogue tracks are building blocks that make the creation of a test movie easier.

In addition to acting awards, Amazon Studios is offering $150,000 a month or more to the best test movies, scripts and dialogue tracks on the site. Learn more about contests here.  Acting awards have been added for September, October, November and December, and eligible performances that don’t win will be automatically considered in future contests. There is no cost to enter.

Performances in eligible test movies and dialogue tracks already on the site (or uploaded by the contest deadline), will be able to compete for awards as long as the actors are registered Amazon Studios participants who are properly credited in the test movies they star in.

So if you’re an actor who has appeared in an Amazon Studios test movie, make sure you work with the person who uploaded the project to ensure that you’re properly credited.

If you’ve uploaded a single-character dialogue track, you might want to look for ways to turn that into a complete dialogue track. Connect with other performers, do some editing with a program like Audacity. When you upload a complete dialogue track to Amazon Studios, lead performances can be considered for acting awards, and the complete dialogue track can compete for awards as well.

Learn more about Amazon Studios and its development process here.

            – Studios Steph

This week, Amazon Studios sent checks to April contest winners. It’s our biggest prize month yet ($175,000) and we’re nowhere near done. We just announced another $430,000 in monthly contests, not to mention our annual awards totaling $1.2 million. Amazon Studios is serious about recognizing and rewarding great scripts — and doing the same thing for compelling visualizations of those scripts. It’s all about putting stories in front of a worldwide audience, to see how people respond.

Amazon Studios has awarded a total of $675,000 to winners so far, which breaks down like this:

• $200,000 in script awards
• $335,000 to writers who created test movies, storyboards and dialogue tracks for scripts they wrote
• $112,000 to people who created test movies for Amazon Studios scripts written by someone else
• $28,000 to writers whose scripts were made into test movies by someone else

Our winners have come from the U.S., Canada and the UK. Expand the circle to semifinalists, and you can add China, Australia, Russia and Spain to the list. Our judges have come from over the world of entertainment: superstar screenwriter (and Iron Man 3 director) Shane Black, award-winning producer and director Gil Cates, Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass, Emmy-winning actor Richard Schiff, director Walt Becker (Van Wilder), script consultant and author Linda Seger and Mike Werb, UCLA visiting assistant professor and writer of Face/Off.

When Amazon Studios launched last November, we had our first contest scheduled for January 2011. But after we attracted more than 1,200 scripts in just two weeks, we added our first bonus contest: two $20,000 script awards for December 2010. That’s more than most script contests give out in a year, but it was just the beginning for Amazon Studios. We went on to add $85,000 in bonus contests for table reads, drawn and photo storyboards and dialogue tracks, on top of the $140,000 per month in awards for scripts and test movies.

And now, Amazon Studios has nearly 5,000 scripts on the site (and nearly 500 test movies). Our team is busy reading (and watching) to determine our next round of semifinalists, which will be announced next week. And then more winners, more checks and more great stories to share with the world.

             – Studios Steph