I was at university when I betrayed my first love of prose to shack up with my new mistress of scriptwriting. I loved the challenges scriptwriting gave me, the restrictions and conventions that teased my creativity into new directions, encouraging greater structure and better ideas.

My love of scriptwriting isn't confined to film though. I produced a radio script for my degree project and have dabbled with comics and television scripts. Each genre brings different challenges and peculiarities to the format.

The urge to write prose still calls me every now and then in the hope that we might get back together, and I must admit to a couple of weekends when I have snuck back and played around a bit, but scriptwriting gets me up in the morning now.

My relationship with scriptwriting has produced a few interesting offspring over the years. By far the most successful to date has been my vampire script, "Nightfall". The first draft was written in 2004 for the inaugural Project Greenlight Australia competition and was redrafted for entry again in 2006. In both competitions it narrowly missed a top ten placing out of a field of 1200.

The video scene from the script, produced by me for the 2006 competition, can be viewed on the right. It is an amateurish affair, but was part of the elimination process. I think I know why I was eliminated and it has nothing to do with the wonderful people who sacrificed their time and eergy to help me pull it together. I should never direct. In future, I'll leave that to others.

The draft of 'Nightfall'included here is the seventh, written in 2007. Hopefully, it will soon be made obsolete by a new draft I'm currently shaping. This new draft radically shifts the scene order and character arcs in the hope of punching more life into the first half and building a stronger sense of dread throughout. As soon as the new draft is ready, I will update this page.

I always enjoy receiving any feedback on my writing, so please feel free to email me your comments to jonathan@jonathancrossfield.com.

The Logline

When David's girlfriend is killed in front of him during a vicious attack, he spirals into a world of grief. So it comes as a shock to see Caroline walking the streets of Sydney a year later. A tale of grief, love and obsession - with an overweight vampire hunter called Barry thrown in.

The Script

Click the button to download a pdf version of the script.

• Nightfall

Copyright 2007 Jonathan Crossfield.