Sandra Ehlermann is the founder of Scriptmakers, the agency that connects screenwriters to producers in the German speaking territories. On scriptmakers.de, she has built up a data base with personal profiles of hundreds of professional screenwriters and hand-picked talented newcomers. Sandra grew up near Cologne in West Germany, spent some years in the US as a young woman, and now lives in Berlin with her Irish partner and 3 daughters. After graduating from film school in Babelsberg in 2006, she dedicated her full attention to her work as a free-lance script reader and consultant for cinema and TV. She is a member of VeDRA, the German Script Advisors Association Film and TV, a member of “Top:Talente”, which offers seminars and workshops for screenwriters, a member of the “Association for the support of German Children’s Films”, and an active member of “Women in Film and Television Germany”. Through her extensive professional and private network, she is familiar with the needs and mindsets both the creative and the production side of the business, and she loves and lives networking.

“After talking to a good many editors, producers, creative producers and writers, it became more and more obvious, how great the pressure and the expectations are on both sides – especially if the commencement of a cooperation and the first developmental stage is at stake.

Very often, producers are looking for specific content and formats they cannot find among unsolicited material. Or they do not get the quality they need because the writers most suitable for the job at hand haven’t  heard of the request. Especially if things have to move quickly, this is a difficult situation. On top of that, I know many directors who are desperately looking for suitable (co-)authors for their dream stories. And what about the developers of interactive media and games whose contents are converging more and more with classical film narration (and vice versa?). There is a large demand and you can make money as a writer if you find the right producers at the right time – or make yourself accessible to them!

I was quite astonished when I noticed that something like Scriptmakers didn’t exist yet. And then I realized that if I don’t do it, nobody will. During the intensive initial leg with a great many conversations, I realized more and more, how big the actual demand for this type of platform is. It also became evident that the idea can only work if you offer it exclusively for professionals and attested talents and if you guarantee a high security for negotiated ideas and texts. We found sound solutions for the question of how such submission calls should be shaped in the most effective and fair way possible.

Let me stress this point once more: Scriptmakers is not in competition with a system that rightly functions mostly through personal contacts. Instead, we hope to become an important supplement and a tool on the way to these contacts, as well as to high-quality content. Scriptmakers should make a real difference!

Producers find writers for certain content and writers find out what producers are looking for.

Be part of it!”