The ScreenCraft Selection Process

We're happy to share some improvements that we've made regarding our process of selecting and announcing placements in ScreenCraft's competitions. The main change to our process is that we will be announcing top 50 finalists ahead of our winners announcements. We've added this step for two reasons: 1) we want to celebrate and recognize the many stellar projects that come through our programs, and 2) we think it's important to show that how our internal evaluation process works. It's admittedly a very subjective process to evaluate screenplays, which are nuanced and complex form of art. We recognize the importance of qualified, experienced readers and judges, which is why the quality of our readers and industry judges is our top priority. Here's how ScreenCraft's writing competitions work:

Each round of reads takes roughly four weeks.

ScreenCraft competitions receive hundreds, and in some cases, thousands, of submissions from writers around the world. Each submission for each competition is carefully read and scored by one of our readers with a 10-point score card and a few sentences of their thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the script. All ScreenCraft readers have at least a year of professional experience reading for either an agency, studio, production company, or literary management company, and we are very selective about whom we hire to read for us.

Quarterfinalists

Once all submissions have been read for the first round, we advance the top 25% to the quarterfinalist round.

Semifinalists

The semifinalists are determined as follows: the submissions that place as quarterfinalists are read a second time by a new ScreenCraft judge with no knowledge of how the entry was scored in the first round. We then calculate a weighted average of the two scores, with a stronger emphasis placed on the higher score and advance the top 10% to the next round.

Finalists

Based on the previous two rounds of evaluations, we'll select the top 50 projects as our finalists.

Winners and Top 10

At this point, the ScreenCraft team will closely review the remaining projects and writers before narrowing to a top 10 and eventually top 5. The top five scripts will be presented to our industry jury, who will select three and rank them according to their preference until a winner and runner up are determined. We then announce our winner, runner-up, honorable mentions and top 10 finalists.

Curious about past winners and their subsequent success? Read about our success stories here.

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