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The University of Wollongong has a talented new screenwriter in its ranks judging by the results of an Australian-wide competition.

The competition, seeking to find new screenwriting talent in the country, attracted 500 entries with UOW PhD student and lecturer in screen writing in the Faculty of Creative Arts, Van Badham, announced one of the three winners.

Van was successful in the John Jameson Productions Screenplay Competition. Jameson Productions are a major sponsor of some of the world's most important film festivals such as Tribeca in New York, the Dublin International Film Festival and Tropfest in Sydney.

She said that there are a lot of pathways for directors to find recognition but for screenwriters it can be more difficult to break through.

Jameson’s did a national call out for ideas for a three-minute film "with an unexpected ending", where a 200 word "pitch" had to be submitted.

From more than 500 entries, they culled down to a shortlist of 40, before culling again to eight finalists.

The finalists came from all over Australia to attend a day workshop at Fox Studios, where they discussed their ideas with directors, producers and special guests like Alice Bell (who wrote Suburban Mayhem) and Pia Miranda (the star of Looking for Alibrandi) and wrote up their scripts.

Scripts were rewritten and re-submitted, and passed on to judges including Academy-Award winning cinematographer Russell Boyd (Master and Commander), Jan Sardi (writer of Shine and Mao's Last Dancer), producer Jane Scott (Strictly Ballroom) and actors Pia Miranda and Lisa Hensley.

At a recent ceremony in Sydney Van was announced one of three winners, each of whose films go into professional production with a $20,000 budget, before being screened around the world.

Van’s short film is a love story about a woman and an octopus. The woman loves the octopus, but she's unsure about committing to a relationship with a cephalopod. It's called Beyond the Sea, after the Bobby Darin song, and there's as much love, lust, heartbreak, joy, sorrow and excitement as one can fit into a three-minute film.

Van said that screen studies has always been one of her academic passions.

“Recently my professional interest as a writer, which for years has been in the theatre, has begun a transition into writing for cinema.

“At present, while I finish my PhD, I am lecturing the second- and third-year screenwriting subjects in the Faculty of Creative Arts.

“My third-years are about to start making their own short films for their assignments and I can't wait to see what they come up with. They're really talented and their energy always inspires me to keep working harder on my own projects,” she said.

Last year Van won a $5,000 development grant from the Australian Writers' Guild to work on her first feature length screenplay, We Come Home (which is set at the University of Wollongong!).

She said that winning the Jameson's competition has boosted her reputation as a screenwriter already - shortly after winning she got an email from her German agent and has been signed on to write a short film in Germany.

Bernie Goldie