This grant to the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) provides funds for the fifth triennial Sloan Film Summit in New York City in 2011. The summit is an important community-building event that brings together prize-winning students, faculty, and administration from the Foundation's six film school partners as well as screenwriters, filmmakers, and administrators from Sloan's four screenplay development and film festival partners: Sundance, Tribeca, Hamptons, and Film Independent. Funded summit activities include an opening night reception; a screening of award-winning shorts from each film school; screenplay readings of award-winning scripts with accomplished actors; panels on science, film, and new media that bring together notable scientists and filmmakers; a meeting of Film program administrators; and an industry meetings where filmmakers meet and pitch their films to leading members of the film industry. Among the key materials that will come out of the summit are a compilation DVD of award-winning shorts and a hard book and an iPhone/iPad application that lists all the screenplay and film projects of the past three years with bios and contact information for the filmmakers to be distributed to agents, managers, and development executives.

This 18-month grant to Columbia University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, will fund a pilot project which aims to encourage science and technology storytelling through the World Wide Web. Guided by Columbia faculty, film students will experiment with the possibilities of new media by creating a 20-40 minute web series, told in three to eight minute narrative episodes (webisodes) with science and technology themes and characters that will reach new audiences. The production awards are open to Columbia students in the third to fifth year who have finished their courses, previously shot a completed film, and have exhibited innovative approaches to the challenges of web storytelling. Five teams will be awarded grants of $14,000 each to work on individual webisodes that will form part of a single web series. Students will work closely with film faculty and a science advisor, and grant funds will be paid out in stages based on adherence to a strict production schedule. Once finished, the web series will be entered into festivals and new media competitions, released on the internet, and distributed virally.

This grant provides continuing support to Columbia University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays and produce short films about science and technology. Activities supported through this grant include the provision of faculty mentors and science advisors for students working on science-themed film projects, two annual awards for production of short films on science and technology, two annual awards to develop promising feature film scripts with science content, and networking events with select film industry producers, agents, and managers.

This grant provides continuing support to Carnegie Mellon University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays about science and technology. Activities supported under this grant include a symposium featuring internationally recognized scientists and technologists discussing current work in their fields; two semesters of training in screenwriting, guest-faculty workshops by accomplished screenwriting mentors; consultations by scientists and technologists on scripts in progress; the presentation of two awards for outstanding student screenplays exploring scientific themes or featuring scientists or technologists as characters, and activities to promote student career advancement, including industry showcases in Los Angeles and New York.

This grant funds three years of the Sloan Science-in-Film initiative by the Sundance Institute, which runs the Sundance Film Festival, the premiere independent film festival in the U.S. Funds will support four annual components of the initiative: a commissioning grant, a feature film fellowship, a $20,000 best Science and Technology feature film prize, and a panel of filmmakers and scientists followed by an awards reception.

This grant to the WGBH Educational Foundation provides development funds for a screenplay about physicist Lise Meitner, who, with Otto Hahn, did the critical research leading to the discovery of nuclear fission, but who was excluded from the Nobel Prize that went to Hahn. Funds will go towards hiring a professional screenwriter to work with the director on the project and for a financing package that will enable a theatrical release and television broadcast on PBS's NOVA.

This grant provides support to the Coolidge Corner Theater, regularly voted the best movie theater in Boston and boasting a national reputation, as it continues its pioneering Science on Screen series and expands the series to movie theaters across the country. The Science on Screen series is notable because-in addition to screening traditional Sloan-style science films like Primer, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Brief History of Time-it takes non-scientific movies like American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fight Club and shines a serious scientific lens on major themes in these films, following each showing with in-depth discussions led by working scientists. At the Arthouse Convergence, a major meeting of Art House theater professionals held in advance of the Sundance Film Festival, Coolidge plans to make a formal presentation and hold a Science on Screen workshop, distributing the syllabus, showcasing videos of speakers, discussing programming ideas, and exploring potential marketing and audience development tactics. This effort is an experiment that seeks to build on build on Coolidge's existing successes and scale them up in a meaningful way.

This grant provides support to the The Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF), for continued development of its activities in the Sloan Film program. HIFF activities consist of a $25,000 annual feature film prize with multiple screenings, a panel with filmmakers and scientists, a reception, and an intensive screenwriting workshop with staged readings of works-in-progress at the festival. Previous Foundation support of HIFF has resulted in an impressive roster of Sloan-winning films and directors, including Darren Aronofsky, Julian Schnabel, Michael Apted, Bill Condon and Marc Abraham, all of whom participated-in person, on video or via letter-at the festival's tenth anniversary tribute to the accomplishments of the Sloan partnership in 2009. Funds from this grant will ensure continuation of this successful partnership through the next three years.

This grant to the Tribeca Film Institute will fund a pilot program to establish an annual Grand Jury Prize award for the single best student screenplay among the Foundation's six film school partners and to develop that script towards production. The aim of the award is to stimulate greater interest and excitement among the participating film schools and film students by awarding a "best of the best" prize and by fast-tracking the winning project for development so it becomes a major career opportunity for the winner. If successful, the award promises to lift the visibility and prestige of both of the winning filmmaker, his school, and the Sloan Film program as a whole.