Orange Entertainment co-producer Stephanie Westwood has won the unproduced category of this year’s AWG John Hinde Award for sci-fi game You Can Survive a Rip Current, while Charlotte Rose Hamlyn and Lucy Campbell took out the produced prizes for an episode of ABC series Space Nova and feature film Monolith, respectively.
The only interactive script in the shortlist, You Can Survive a Rip Current follows central character Toby, who has been seeing flashes of a tragedy befalling a stranger in their dreams – and must figure out how to stop it, before it is too late.
Westwood will now receive mentorship from a senior writer or producer with genre expertise, and $5,000 in script development funding for her project.
“You Can Survive a Rip Current began as something I needed to write during the marriage equality referendum, as a love letter to my past self,” Westwood said.
“It could only be in an interactive format – it requires active participation, just as any form of protest, love, or mutual aid does. It is such an honour to have my work recognised by the AWG, especially an interactive fiction project, so different from a traditional feature or pilot in many ways. I hope it only leads to further discovery and cross-pollination between Australia’s very talented games and interactive artists, and the wider film and television industry.”
Meanwhile, Charlotte Rose Hamlyn and Lucy Campbell, who took out the produced prizes, will each receive $10,000 for their wins.
Hamlyn’s “Bread Nova” episode of Space Nova follows Jet Nova, who creates his own bread-based clone to skip a tedious spaceport meeting. His plan backfires when a delicious doppelgänger is unleashed, determined to eliminate its original at any cost.
“Only in the genre of science-fiction and in the good humour of children’s television is a quirky concept about bioengineered bread doppelgängers even possible,” she said, “and my heartfelt thanks go to the teams at ABC, SLR Productions, and head writer/script producer Thomas Duncan-Watt for not only making a stellar show (pun always intended) but for allowing and supporting our wildest ideas.”
Campbell’s film Monolith premiered in Australia at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival. It follows a desperate young journalist who turns to podcasting to salvage her career, but her rush to make headlines leads her to an alien conspiracy.
“As a kid, science fiction movies gave me an escape into a thrilling, freaky, sometimes scary and often beautiful world of otherworldly possibilities,” she said, “and I’m so pleased that sci-fi writers have a home with the John Hinde Award – sci-fi forever!”
The three awards were selected from almost 200 entries. Two other shortlisted screenplays were highly commended by the judges:
- The Borders by Adam Scullin (Television, Unproduced Category). It follows a grieving detective’s hunt for her partner’s killer, which thrusts her into a shadow war between a malevolent dimension seeking to destroy the world and a top-secret unit holding it at bay.
- Latency by James Croke (Feature Film, Produced in 2022 Category). It tells the story of Hana, a professional gamer, who is asked to test new gaming equipment which uses A.I. to read her mind, blurring the line between reality and the subconscious. Hana must then decide if the device is helping her or serving a more sinister force.