Do I have to be Canadian?
Oh Canada! Our home and native land! …
While Canada may be the home of the aptly named; Canadian Short Screenplay Competition, we look at the entries from the world over.
To answer your doubts of “do you accept entries from [insert country]?”, yes we do. This is one of the many ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ that CSSC founder, David Cormican addresses in his video blog series which can be found below.
Check back with the CSSC blog to watch the rest of the videos.
And remember, as said at the end of this video… Short.Is.Better.
Deadlines Help
Do you have a hard time understanding our (what some may call) complex deadline system?
We here at the CSSC have been receiving a lot of e-mails about the contest and/or certain aspects of the competition. To clear air of any confusion, the CSSC Founder, David Cormican has decided to address these concerns in an open and public forum for all to view.
His method of choice? A series of Youtube videos that look to help with the frequently asked questions. Check back to this blog for the rest of the series, but for now we shall start with the video about deadline help.
If you have any questions about the video, I suggest a right-click and selecting the ‘Watch on Youtube’ option. From there you can leave comments, and we’ll get to answering them ASAP.
Remember, Short.Is.Better!
Top 10 Myths About Entering Screenplay Competitions Demystified
We all wonder what really happens when we put our script out there to be judged in a competition. And then we wonder: what if we could just understand the process a little better to make my entry stand out from the heaps of other submissions?
Is there anything you can do to better your odds of coming out on top? Or, at least making it to the 2nd round? Canadian Short Screenplay Competition founder David Cormican took time out of his schedule to help us debunk some of the most commonly held misconceptions and myths about entering screenplay competitions.
10. Genre-specific categories/restrictions only apply to other people’s scripts; My script is so great it transcends all genres.
That may very well be the truth, but it’s also likely that your zombie script has just been disqualified from the romantic comedy competition and you might as well have chain-sawed through your entry fee, ’cause it’s gone.
9. Organizers like being presented with alternate endings. It’s like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, people like to be able to choose their own endings.
No. Organizers just want to choose a winning screenplay. Stick to one story. Your story. That means, no blue, gold, pink pages, rewrites, alternative endings, or You choose to go left, turn to page 16 endings. None. Period.
8. Binding, bounding and special covers on my script makes it stand out.
True. But it also makes it much more difficult on the reader and could negatively impact your score. Or, worse yet, disqualify your entry. I read every script that comes through the CSSC. Now imagine a stack of hundreds of scripts and one of them somewhere stuffed in the middle (likely nearer the bottom) has a slippery plastic cover on it. Mid-way through my evening of scoring scripts they all come crashing down due to… you guessed it, your script. As well, many bindings don’t allow a reader to lay the script flat, open it properly or insert our scoring sheet. My advice is stick to 1 or 2 brass brads. That’ s it. And they work every time.
7. They don’t need my contact information on my script too, it’s already on my registration form.
Not true. Competitions receive hundreds, if not thousands of entries from all across the world. They each have their own filing system and ways to keep track of your script and entry. If they can’t pair your perfectly scored script sans title page to a registration form, let alone a name, you likely won’t be seeing the winners podium, let alone the 2nd round of judging. That said, each competition has their own rules regarding indentifying information and title pages. Best to read the rules and follow their lead.
6. I don’t know anyone at the competition office so my script will never win.
Maybe the rest of the film industry works on who you know and who knows you, but that is the beauty of entering a screenplay contest. Most are usually blind-scored and are based almost entirely on talented story-telling (formatting aside), versus your uncle being one of the producers on TWILIGHT or your ability to attach Matt Damon and George Clooney for financing. Although, this would be great information to share with producers AFTER your script wins a competition. Especially one where they make the winning entry, like the CSSC.
5. The rules state “no more than ‘x’ pages in length”, mine is only 2 pages over, it won’t matter.
Unfortunately, yes it will. A 10, 15, 20 or whatever page maximum is a rule. And a rule is a rule. Try to find a way to either distill your script down further to tell the same story with fewer words, scenes, locations or dialogue. Or, if you’ve tried everything and it’s just not possible to reduce it any further to meet the limit, maybe it’s time to either A) find a different competition to enter, or B) write a new script that falls within this competition’s guidelines. Otherwise, it will either cost you points, a disqualifications and your entry fee. Remember: Short.Is.Better. Write it down and repeat that every time to write. I find it helps you to craft and hone your scripts down to the very essence of the story.
4. I don’t like standard screenplay formatting, or can’t seem to get the hang of it. Someone at the contest can/should fix it for me.
Nope. That’s supposed to be your job. Remember, you are trying to break out in this industry as a bonafide screenwriter. If you don’t know basic script formatting, it’s time to hit the library and the internet and find some examples of screenplays, take a class, go to school or ask for help from a friend who knows what you should be doing. Which might be finding a new profession…
3. I’m putting together my own short film and am falling short on the financing, the screenplay competition can help me out with extra funds, right?
Highly unlikely. Competitions have their own mandates and budgets. And allowing someone to skip the competition factor and jump right into the production queue isn’t likely to be a part of their business plan. This actually happens more than you would think. It is unprofessional and likely to get you remembered, for all the wrong reasons.
2. My question is so special that its answer won’t be found anywhere on the website, in the rules or FAQ’s.
Well, they’re all there for a reason. And for good reasons at that. It’s doubtful that your answer doesn’t exist, as they have likely already been asked at some point. Always check these places first to make sure your question still needs asking. If you still can’t find it, by all means drop an email or call if they have a number. But make it brief and always remember to be courteous and appreciative for the assistance.
1. Printing and BLOCK CAPS on the registration form is for sissies; my hand-writing is just fine.
No. No, it’s not. Trust me. After sifting through the eightieth submission form of the day, peoples eyes are bleary and they don’t want to disqualify you on a mere technicality or worse yet, not be able to read your name so they know who to make the cheque payable to.
Give your script the best chance possible. Read the rules for each competition you plan on entering and be as diligent with your entry forms as you have been with your script. Remember when you triple checked for spelling, formatting and punctuation on your script. You did remember to proof-read your script. Right!?
David Cormican is the founder of the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition, a producer, performer, father and a well-dressed man who has his own way with words.
For more information on the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition and how to enter, please visit:
www.Screenplay-Compeition.com
CSSC Coupon
Are you planning on sending your script physically to the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition as opposed to using the Withoutabox service? If so, this printable coupon may just come in handy and save you a bit of your hard earned cash.
The coupons value is 10 dollars off your entry fee and can be seen below.
So what are you waiting for? Get sending you screenplays in as soon as possible!
Youth Bocce and Helen Hatzis
Not only does Helen Hatzis, Director of CSSC short; Seeing in the Dark, care about films, she cares about people and their well being. Over the past 9 years Helen has volunteered with Youth Bocce, who happen to publish an annual Special Olympics Bocce publication.
In this years issue, there is a page dedicated to Helen. View it below:
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This is a wonderful cause and if you’d like to find more information on Youth Bocce, visit the official website; http://youthbocce.com/
Short Films a Glimpse In the Future
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins recently wrote a very interesting article in the Barrie Examiner regarding (you guessed it,) Short Film! Check it out below:
While people may dismiss short films as a juvenile or insignificant pastime, to me they represent nothing less than the past and future of cinema.
The first films ever made were shorts, as the medium’s inventors experimented with technology and audiences. Many all-time classic cartoons, now considered children’s fare, premiered as shorts in adult screenings not originally aimed at children.
My own introduction to repertory cinema was through shorts. Studying at the University of Waterloo, I was peripherally aware of the Princess Cinema, which screened foreign and independent “art” films — not something I ever expected to follow. But classmates dragged me to a shorts showcase and I was hooked. It was the Sick & Twisted Animation Festival, or something similar — lots of cartoons that were hilarious and a bit too much (or a lot too much) for TV. (This was long before the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, of course.)
It was exactly what thrilled rowdy students. A similar attraction was a compilation of the year’s best commercials from around the world. If you think TV ads are boring, you should see the amazingly funny (and risque) ads that run in Europe. We also saw very moving, even shocking, public service announcements. If all ads were this great, we’d prefer them over the shows.
Before you know it, I was a Princess Cinema member and expanding my horizons beyond the short and silly. But I still hold a soft place for them in my heart, and upon moving here and learning of Barrie’s annual film festival, what drew me in was the shorts program.
Shorts also represent the future of cinema. Many famous directors got their start with a popular or critically-acclaimed short. Remember the hopping desk lamp and other characters of early Pixar work? Pixar now has dozens of Oscars, billions in sales.
This summer’s sci-fiand social commentary hitDistrict 9began as a six-minute short film which so impressed Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Ringsfame) that he bankrolled a $30 million full production. Disney shorts screened before black-and-white movies paved the way for the colourful feature-length productions that spawned an entertainment empire.
After falling from prominence in the 80s and 90s, short film has seen a massive resurgence with the ability to upload your work to the world on YouTube-type sites.
One of my favourite volunteer roles is with the Short Film Competition of the Barrie Film Festival. Although I help here and there with the organization, my chief task is taking part in judging the films submitted. It’s an amazing experience. I get to see all of the dozens of films sent in by budding young cinematographers, or lifetime hobbyists.
There’s good, there’s bad, there’s certainly ugly, but each expresses ideas and feelings. Sometimes the judges quickly agree on a film (whether great or ghastly), but other times we are sharply divided. Humour that seems fresh or clever to one, is a groaner to another. Luckily, we have a complex grading system to systematize our reactions and create a numeric ranking.
The result is quite a showcase of talent. As many as half the films screened are produced by Simcoe County residents. And about half are by high school or college students. These give a window into the amazing artistic sensitivity and technical skills that our youth have, and show that our area produces artists with a compelling vision. We also get submissions from around the world.
Source: Barrie Examiner
Short Films Write Up
The Times of India posted an interesting article about Short Film that is an interesting read. Check it out below:
They say that big surprises come in small packages. That is what must be meant when famous talent scouts all across the world first see
the short films made by a greenhorn before giving him or her a chance to direct a major motion picture.Probably the most common examples these days of good quality short films are the products released by Pixar Studios, which tends to package a small story along with its major films.
It is to encourage exactly this kind of an effort that the International Film Festival in Nagpur (IFFN) has organised a short film contest. Not only that, but also probably for the first time anywhere in the world, the short films have been shown on the local television network
, so that the masses can have just a preview of the talents of the years to come. In addition, they have also gotten to vote for the top 20 films, which are to be shown in the festival.As a short film is definitely a different medium from a full length feature film, it is not defined in a very exact manner anywhere. It’s like what a short story is to a novel. For example, in a short story, the reader has to imagine or understand on his or her own. Similarly, in a short film, the scene is just a part of a bigger story. On the other hand, a feature film can be a complete story, with little space for loose ends or pending explanations, explains Pradeep Ganguly, a film and music enthusiast.
If you wish to read the full article, click HERE.
Five Short Films Worthy of the Big Screen Treatment
With the success of District 9, io9.com decided they would take a look at what other short films they’d really like to see make the transition over to the Big Screen. Not that we agree with the logic, to us, short films can stay short, after all, Short Is Better…
Excerpt from Article:
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
Notes: Jasper Morello proved a film festival darling, taking top prizes at the Australian Film Institute Awards, Flickerfest, and Dragon Con, and received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film.Synopsis: Jasper Morello, a disgraced airman, lives in a city plagued by a terrible and incurable sickness. He is called to be a navigator on a mission carrying an unusual passenger, the eccentric physician Claude Belgon, who is studying airmen in hopes of devising a cure. During the voyage, his wife back home, a nurse, develops the sickness, but the crew finds a strange beast whose flesh can cure the sickness. Unfortunately, the creature has a taste for human blood.
How it could be expanded: Already 26 minutes long, Jasper Morello wouldn’t need much expanding once we get a bit more into Jasper’s background and the personalities of the crew. But in an expanded Jasper Morello, Claude Belgon could commission an air mission on behalf of the Royal Academy to find a mysterious treasure long rumored by airmen to exist on a far off island, one closely guarded by air pirates. Belgon is fully aware of the treasure’s true nature: it is a deadly monster that could potentially cure the sickness. When the airship reaches the island, they are nearly thwarted by the air pirates, but they manage to defeat them, taking one unconscious pirate hostage. They find several of the monster cocoons and take them aboard, but then crew members start disappearing. It is not until the air pirate wakes that it is revealed that Belgon has been feeding the crewmen to the growing monsters. From there, the remaining crew would have to evade Belgon and the monsters (and keep the ship afloat). In the final confrontation, it would be revealed that Belgon chose Morello specifically for this mission because he knew of Morello’s disgrace and his wife’s likelihood of contracting the sickness, and believed it would make him easy to manipulate. The film ends not with Morello trapped in a cavern feeding the beast, but him steering the monster-filled airship home after killing Belgon, knowing full well that, in trying to save his wife, he could be condemning the entire city.
What could kill it: Much of the short’s charm comes from its silhouette animation, which might not translate well to a feature-length film. A live action, or perhaps stop motion, film would have to stay close to the look and feel of the original.
Want to read what other 4 films io9 selected? Read the full article at this link – CLICK HERE.
Daniel Audet
For Daniel Audet, the idea of confining his two female characters to an old, rusted car sunken into a coulee at the edges of town was just the beginning of his screenplay. He needed a ‘spark,’ a punch line – an image he could build up to throughout his story; that’s when the idea of a burning car popped into his head.
To reveal more would ruin the twist of his story, but suffice it to say, once Dan found the ‘spark’ to Rusted Pyre, the third-place winning entry in the 2008 Canadian Short Screenplay Competition, the rest of the writing just flowed. Now this Alberta native and film school grad will see his short screenplay become a film later in the year, as part of his third-place prize in the competition. “So far this is going to be my first real project and the first screenplay of mine that will be produced into a film,” he says. “I actually didn’t even enter any other competitions because I was really only interested in seeing my script get made, rather than prizes, and the possibility of having that done with a professional crew was too exciting to pass up.”
Dan first heard about the competition from his girlfriend’s mom, who read an article about Year of the Skunk Productions and the CSSC in the local Lethbridge Herald. An aspiring filmmaker who completed his BFA at the University of Lethbridge and took Digital Film Production at Langara College in Vancouver, he decided to enter. “I didn’t think I would actually get into the position where I’d be making it,” he explains. “I was just hoping to get some feedback from someone who actually reads screenplays.”
After a few tries at shooting and editing his own work (he likens his earlier works to “trailers I had to explain to my audience”), he turned to Rusted Pyre, a short script he had written a couple of years before. In brief, Rusted Pyre is about one very trippy evening shared by Ginny and Sally, two high-school girls in a small town in the Prairies. When Sally lures her friend into a so-called ‘haunted car’ at the outskirts of town, what starts as a practical joke turns into a terrifying experience that blurs the lines between fiction and reality.
With shooting set to begin later in the year, Dan is hoping to see the shoot and “just learn a ton from it,” perhaps even make it into a potluck community Dan Audet event with free beer and pizza. He’s also working on a longer script about his tree-planting experiences, and hopes to use this unique opportunity from the CSSC to build up his portfolio when he re-applies to the Canadian Film Centre’s screenwriting program. “I feel that the production of actual winning scripts makes the CSSC a very important one,” he says. “I believe that having my work produced will not only be a tremendous learning experience for my future scripts but also a very strong element in my portfolio.” As an added bonus, he will get to meet with top literary agent Glenn Cockburn of Meridian Artists to pitch his ideas.
For other aspiring screenwriters out there who don’t know where to start – or what exactly a short film is – Dan was in the same boat. “I didn’t quite know what a short film was at first,” he admits. “What poetry is to a novel? A commercial for a longer film?” For starters, he found the books The Anatomy of Story by John Truby and Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch to be particularly helpful, as well as In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. “Even though it’s a book on editing I find that an understanding of the concept of editing to be very useful when writing,” he explains.
He also recommends starting with a good, sharp concept and writing as much as possible, even jotting down snippets of script ideas on note cards, letting them percolate in a pile, and when an idea pops out, to take it and go with it – just like he did with the image of a burning car. Some solid inspiration doesn’t hurt either; Dan admires how directors David Cronenberg and David Lynch put their own spins on the horror genre. “I’ve been strongly influenced by their use of horror and fear as vehicles to explore much stronger themes and stories than your typical ‘scary movie,’” Dan explains. “I’m also particularly interested in Cronenberg’s career as a Canadian filmmaker who has carved out his own niche of atypical Canadian content.”
And why is shorter better? “Remember you can do different things in a short that you couldn’t do in a longer film, you can get away with some things you can’t do in a [one and a half] hour film.”
Books of Interest
If you’re a writer, you’re always looking to improve your writing. One of the ways to improve is by reading others work, and reading theory on writing to get insights into how it all works. So with your help on Twitter, I’ve compiled a list of the 3 useful screenwriting books to help you master your craft.
1) Syd Field’s Screenplay
Amazong link to book’s page
Recommended by Twitter user: Adam Hunt
2) William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade
Amazon link to book’s page
Recommended by Twitter user and CSSC founder: David Cormican
3) Linda Seger’s Making a Good Script Great
Amazon link to book’s page
Recommended by Twitter user: Carolynne Ciceri
Hopefully those will help you on your journey of becoming a better writer!
