Academy Award-winning director, producer, screenwriter and California vintner Francis Ford Coppola announced the re-launch of The Family Coppola’s Zoetrope.com website, a home and virtual studio for the writing community.
The redesign showcases many enhanced options, one of the most notable additions being the highly anticipated section for short films.
Zoetrope.com, an interactive crowd-sourcing, online writing workshop platform, was originally launched nearly two decades ago, with the intention that it would be a network for artists, but more importantly would provide a great source of content and story ideas for Coppola’s acclaimed literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story. However, the platform quickly gained traction among writers as a vibrant online community. A revolutionary use of the internet at the time, Zoetrope.com established itself as an early pioneer in social media. Writers that had been working in isolation now had an engaging community where they could share their stories, make contacts, and learn from one another. Directors, producers and other artists soon joined and the site transformed into a virtual studio. The website set the precedent for a new era of crowd-sourcing and writing workshops.
Coppola has always envisioned the site as a means to benefit the creative community. Zoetrope.com is free to join, and always has been.
“When I was a kid I remember looking in the locked gates of a movie studio which was across the street from the Junior High School I was attending. I was wishing that I could get in and see what these mythical movie studios were. Years later I actually bought that studio, and I went to that Junior High School and I talked about it to the students and I said alright kids lets go, and I took them across the street and right in through the studio gates. And that’s what I was trying to do with this site – let everyone have access to a movie studio or set a new context of creative community for people interested in cinema, music, acting, art, graphics, photography, songwriting, and so on,” said Francis Coppola.
Recently launched alongside the revised Zoetrope.com are two writing contests, the twentieth annual Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest and the fourteenth annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest, both of which are running on Zoetrope.com where anyone can submit entries. The grand prize for the fiction contest is $1,000 and $5,000 for the screenplay contest. Both contest winners will also receive consideration from top literary and talent agencies. For more information and to enter: https://www.zoetrope.com/contests
