Tracy Richardson is the winner of Screenworks’ Discovering New Voices: Romantic Comedy initiative, beating out a field of more than 50 applicants with her project Light Up Christmas.
The early-career writer from Myocum in Northern NSW will now participate in a paid four-week attachment with Hoodlum Entertainment to further hone her concept and get hands-on experience in the development and production processes.
Light Up Christmas follows a pompous celebrity art critic with a Scrooge-like contempt for Christmas who must lead a street to victory in a Christmas lights competition if she is to inherit her aunt’s house and avoid becoming bankrupt.
Richardson, who participated in Screenworks’ Write From Home international mentorship program in 2020, said she and the other finalists had already benefitted from the program’s three-stage selection process.
“What I liked about the Discovering New Voices: Rom Com program was that all finalists were winners, in that everyone walked away with a better version of their story as a result of going through development consultations with Hoodlum,” she said.
“I feel privileged to have been selected to work with Hoodlum to make my story Light Up Christmas the best version of itself. A big thank you to Screenworks for continuing to support emerging screenwriters.”
Supported through the Screenrights Cultural Fund, the callout for the initiative was issued in late 2021, offering participants and project teams the opportunity to develop features and series within the genre.
Hoodlum chief content officer Tracey Vieira said the company had been “incredibly impressed” with the range of diverse voices represented in the applications.
“Tracy Richardson did this perfectly in embracing the rom-com but finding a new way into the story that will also connect with a broad audience,” she said.
“We are really excited to continue to work with Tracy through this initiative.”
Screenworks CEO Ken Crouch said Richardson represented one of many distinct storytelling voices that could be found across regional Australia.
“We’re looking forward to supporting Tracy on her four-week internship with Hoodlum – it will be a wonderful opportunity for her to learn more about the valuable skills of writing rom-com, as well as to further develop her own project,” he said.
“We’re extremely grateful to Screenrights for enabling us to give this opportunity to a regional Australian practitioner.”