May the 4th be with you!

Yes, it’s our annual SCRIPT PITCH SCI FI SPECIAL.

That means you have before you the best new script projects in the SF genre. Anywhere. That’s a fact.

Here are the loglines from this year’s Sci-Fi Pitch.

To read complete pitches and to contact any of the writers, please email Andy.

This month we welcome the multitalented, hyper-prolific Alice Lowe, a writer, director and actress known for her work in British comedy.

After receiving a raucous reception and the Directing Prize in the U.S. Competition at its Sundance premiere, Robert Eggers’s debut film The Witch has proven to be a far greater success than he could have ever anticipated. We spoke with him about how he got to this point, his route from a career in art and production design for fringe theatre, into making short films and finally financing a feature.

A new festival, co-curated by BRITDOC‘s Luke Moody and Nico Marzano from the ICA, Frames of Representation offers a selection of the sort of documentaries that rarely reach UK audiences through regular distribution. Presenting new styles, methods and forms for non-fiction filmmaking, the programme focuses on films that present their subjects in unique and innovative ways. Their inaugural edition is based around the theme of the ‘New Periphery’, looking at documentaries that bring marginalised individuals to the forefront of the screen and offer voices to those traditionally unheard or silenced.

We’ve picked out three films from the festival’s selection of eight features and three masterclasses that you must not miss.

The esteemed Mark Cousins has provided his thoughts on the highest voted entries for March Film of the Month.

Renting filmmaking equipment can be a costly and arduous process. A lot of the time its easier and much more cost effective to borrow from friends and collaborators. Newly launched service KitMapper offers a much easier and affordable way to source equipment, letting filmmakers hire kit from other nearby filmmakers. Listers can advertise their equipment on a browsable or searchable map, and hirers can search for what they need and where they can find it near them. We caught up with their founder Dave Charlesworth to hear about how the service came about and what it can offer to filmmakers.

In the midst of the UK release of his feature film debut The Witch, Robert Eggers joins us as the judge for April Film of the Month.

After careful consideration Pegah Farahmand is back with her decisions on the February Film of the Month finalists.

If you enjoy Pegah’s feedback head over to Channel 4’s Random Acts, their dedicated arts strand for innovative and creative short film commissions, and check out her work as the Editor. After previously working at VICE for 10 years, Pegah certainly has a discerning eye for the film industry and we can’t wait to disclose her choices on the top three.

Spring is officially here, not that you can necessarily tell yet, and its the busiest time for production. Join SP (at 50% off until April 5th) to meet fantastic collaborators like those below, and get those productions rolling going forward into the summer.

In case you are not familiar, Shooting People is the largest and best network for independent filmmakers in the UK, a 38,000 member community that is host to filmmaking events, opportunities, training and funds, in which 200+ projects are casted and crewed weekly.

Please check out our community, ask your friends about us, say hello at one of our events, and join us and start making great films with other talented and emerging filmmakers. Independent filmmaking starts with collaboration and spirit, so make those initial steps with SP and you never know what you’ll have made or where you’ll be come summer. Have a read of what some of the membership has been up to this year so far.

As the pre-screening credit roll and accompanying statement (“our credits tell the story”) boasts, graduates of the National Film & Television School’s filmmaking courses tend to go places. As well as all the cross discipline feature work they advertised recent graduates having been involved in, the prominence of their graduates in festival and award circuits seems to be hard to miss. At the recent BAFTA ceremony, both short film awards, live action and animated, were won by (female) NFTS graduates. (Nina Gantz for Edmond and Caroline Bartleet for Operator.)

We checked out the graduating short films they presented a few weeks back, to try to look out for names and films that are likely to continue to crop up as the year develops.