Mary Ratliff is a storyteller at heart, and is equally at home working on fiction and documentary films. As an active member of the D.C. film community, she has worked on several features, a webseries, commercials, and numerous short films as a member of the art department and a script supervisor.
As a screenwriter, Mary was a finalist in last year's DC Shorts Screenwriting Competition and the recipient of the Will Interactive Dramatic Short Screenplay award for her script, "Catching Up." The film also received the Panavision New Filmmaker Grant, and the completed short won the Visions Award for Outstanding Thesis Project in 2011.
Ratliff has earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Film and Electronic Media at American University (Washington D.C.) and a BA from Hollins University (Roanoke, VA) with a major in Film and Photography and a minor in Art History.
Besides her work in Film, Mary is also an avid photogapher and writer, and has written articles for online magazines including io9 (see below). Mary is also a proud gamer. It was her love of the gaming community that lead to her latest film, the feature length documentary Good Game (in production).
Awards:
2011:
"Catching Up" (writer/director)
-Won: Visions Award for Outstanding Thesis Project
-Nominated: Will Interactive Dramatic Short Award
"Extraction" (writer/director)
-Finalist, Waynesboro Short Film Festival
2010:
"Catching Up" (writer)
-Won: Will Interactive Dramatic Short Screenplay Award
-Finalist: DC Shorts Screenwriting Competition
-Nominated: Visions Award for Outstanding Short Screenplay
-Selected: DC Film Salon Screenplay Reading
"Up Hill" (cinematographer/editor)
-Nominated: Visions Award for Outstanding Documentary Short
2009:
"Cookies" (1st AD)
-Won: TIVA DC Peer Gold Award for Outstanding Dramatic Student Short
-Nominated: Visions Award for Outstanding Dramatic Short
Screenwriting:
Quarterfinalist: Creative Screenwriting Cyberspace Open
Additional Clients
Other clients I have worked for include:
- Food Network (Shooters Inc.)
- The History Channel (Go Go Lucky)
- The Gracie Awards/The Alliance for Women in Media
- Tyson's Tomorrow
- SCORE
- ASWA
- The US-New Zealand Council
- Will Interactive
FILMMAKING 101: io9 SERIES
While working as an intern at well-known Sci-Fi Magazine io9, I wrote a short series on Filmmaking with a focus to low-budget science fiction work:
- 5 Simple Rules for Turning Your Cool Idea Into a Screenplay
- How To Make Your Characters Pop Without Using Words
- The Brutal Master Plan That Can Keep Your Dystopian Epic From Turning Into A Disaster Movie
-
Making A Science Fiction Movie On A Shoestring: Where Can You Cut Corners?
