The Canadian Short Screenplay Competition (CSSC) is an annual script writing contest, established in 2008, for short film screenwriting.
The CSSC, founded in 2008 by producer David Cormican, is administered by Year of the Skunk Productions. The competition's partners in 2008 included Playback, Meridian Artists, InkTip, The Spoke Club and Withoutabox.
In August 2009, the competition started the now popular #WW (Writer Wednesday) hashtag on social networking site Twitter.com.[1]
In 2010, the competition partnered with the Yorkton Film Festival, allowing the CSSC to announce the winner of the competition as part of the Golden Sheaf Awards gala. The first winner announced in this fashion was British writer Neil Graham on May 29, 2010, in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Neil Graham and his winning script "Something Pointless", was the very first recipient of the Writer's Block Crystal, introduced to the competition in 2010 as a takeaway award for the winning screenwriter.[2]
In June 2010, the CSSC announced two-time competition finalist, Carolynne Ciceri, as the inaugural #WW Writers Wednesday Laureate.[3] Ciceri's duties as #WW Laureate consist of a year-long position posting a weekly blog communication on the subjects of writing, filmmaking, and short films.
On January 1, 2011, the CSSC's THE Blog was announced as a winner of the 2010 Canadian Weblog Awards in the category of 'Writing and Literature'.[4]
The CSSC maintains that they conceptualized and posted the very first weekly hashtag #WW (popularly used and known amongst writing circles as Writer Wednesday)[5] on social media networking site Twitter.com. Writers and users of the site may nominate writers on Twitter, encouraging others using the site to follow by using the #WW hashtag (similar to
The original #WW Writers Wednesday tweet was made using TweetDeck on August 5, 2009.[1]
1- "Elijah the Prophet", Jesse & Zachary Herrmann
2- "Strange Music", Ira Henderson
3- "13", Sundae Jahant-Osborn
1- "Something Pointless", Neil Graham
2- "Minus Lara", Surita Parmar
3- "The Kicker", Jag Dhadli[6]
The Canadian Short Screenplay Competition filmed "Minus Lara" starring Romina D'Ugo in Regina, Saskatchewan and "Rusted Pyre"[7] starring Samantha Somer Wilson and Brooke Palsson in Havelock, Saskatchewan in November of 2010.
2008 Best in Fest Recipient: Seeing In The Dark written by Gordon Pengilly[9]
2008 Golden Cinema Recipient: No Man’s Land written by David Carey
2008 Silver Screen Recipient: Rusted Pyre written by Daniel Audet