MUMBAI: The jury for British Council and Saregama India’s – The India Screenwriting Workshop – was held on 20 February in Mumbai.

The workshop has been initiated to develop and improve the quality of scriptwriting in India and aims to hone the skills of the budding scriptwriters.

The jury comprising Saregama India’s chief creative officer B R Sharan, Abbas Tyrewala, Paromita Vohra and Nandana Sen shortlisted 10 scripts out of the 700-odd entries the British Council received. These 10 scriptwriters will get the opportunity to interact in group and individual sessions with screenwriters of international repertoire, with the aim of developing their own screenplays.

Indian films are increasingly finding a place for themselves on the world stage and yet so far their appeal is mostly limited to an India-centric audience. The aim of this script-writing workshop is to address that gap, to explore and encourage the basic fundamentals of story structure and techniques of script-writing.

The guidelines that will be offered in the workshop will be on how to continue the process of learning the craft on their own so as to become full-fledged scriptwriters etc. This workshop will also get participants to write under supervision: from theme, to premise, to story to even treatment for a screenplay. Ten emerging and established screenwriters with unproduced work at an early stage of development will be selected for this workshop.

The workshop will be held over seven days from 17 – 23 March, 2008 at The International Centre, Goa. At the end of the workshop a seed grant will be awarded to the writers whose stories show the best potential for development into a quality screenplay.