Competitions

The Big Shot

Rodger Cove writing professionally in radio where he worked for seven years as a copywriter.  Since then he has published short fiction, has had stage and radio plays produced, and has written seven feature length screenplays (selling options on three so far).  A past Praxis Fellow, he has also been a semi-finalist in the prestigious Chesterfield and Nicholl Screenwriting Competitions.  Related work experience includes stints as a dramaturge, script analyst, and story editor for Theatre Terrific, CBC Western Drama Development, British Columbia Film, Movie Central, and Praxis, and he has taught at the Trebas Institute, Kwantlen University College, and Matsqui Medium Security Prison.  He now teaches at the Vancouver Film School.  His feature, Roadside, in development with Mad Hat Productions, recently received second round financing from Movie Central and Telefilm Canada.  The Big Shot is his first collaboration with Dale Wolfe.


Dale Wolfe graduated with an honours diploma in broadcasting and his career has included television anchoring, acting, writing, hosting top rated radio shows and playing professional golf.

His recent acting credits include the 2005 CBS Television movie, Witness:  Amber Frey and the 2006 feature film, Scary Movie 4.  He has also had principle roles in several national television commercials in the US, Canada and Europe – including Advil, Comcast and Nintendo.

He was a staff writer on the television pilot, The Chat Channel starring Fred Willard, and recently wrote, produced and directed the short comedy, Getting A Head – a mockumentary about mascots and a festival hopeful for 2006.

As golf professional, he spent several years playing on various pro tours, which eventually became the inspiration for The Big Shot, his first collaboration with screenwriter Rodger Cove.

The Big Shot
Thirteen year-old Stuart Dougal’s destiny is to become a professional golfer.  But a centuries old family curse causes his father grave concerns, especially after a golf related mishap puts the boy in a coma.  

Ten years later, now physically a man, but emotionally still a boy, Stuart emerges from the coma even more determined to pursue his dream.  Unable to stand in the way of destiny, his father enlists the aid of Twister Green, an expert on the curse that has plagued generations of Dougals and their lovers.  If anyone can help Stuart realize his dream, it’s Twister.  

With Twister calling the shots, Stuart is an immediate, dazzling success on the mini-tours and quickly captures the attention of Dick Shredder, Commissioner of the XGT – The Extreme Golf Tour – and a descendant of the evil Hector McShreddrick, the villain who placed the original curse on the Dougals back in 1746.  Dick is recruiting players for his new WWF style, no holds barred version of golf, and “The Coma Kid” would be the perfect marquee star for this latest travesty in sports entertainment.  

Danger looms, however, when Stuart invokes the consequences of the curse by rejecting Twister’s advice and falling for both the lure of easy money, and for Lisa Jones, the lovely sports psychology student who has been following his story with scientific interest.   It is only by re-embracing honor, tradition, and the love of the game – and of Lisa – that Stuart comes of age and is able to pull off the big shot, break the McShreddrick curse and reverse the tragic Dougal legacy.

Bitter, Sweet, and Beautiful

John Hillis
Born in the sixties, acquiring his fashion sense in the seventies, his fiscal management in the eighties and his creative thrust in the nineties, John remains a confused man with a decided lack of coherent direction. Or so his family tells him. Not one to rest in obscurity, he has joined the rest of Halifax’s population in the mandatory two year film conscription. Not much with numbers he seems to be counting in dog years, hopefully this is not a reflection of the work he produces. John hopes to avoid success thereby circumventing the paperwork and financing headaches that accompany the quality commercial productions that provide an income to those that produce it. At the turn of the century John realized life could no longer be measured in decades and with the idea of counting millennium looming large has now given up on math.

Bitter, Sweet, and Beautiful is a quiet and touching study of a family forced to adapt to painful and unwanted changes.

While coping with her husband Archie’s early onset of Alzheimer’s, Agnes’s world explodes when her granddaughter Sarah (14) is unceremoniously dumped on her doorstep. Sarah’s mother has just died and her father disappeared, unable to cope.

A sullen, grieving girl only adds to Agnes’s mounting list of worries – Archie’s slipping health, a push to move him out of his lifelong home, money matters … even a broken fridge – all boil over during a summer heat wave.

Agnes finds support in her neighbor Sybil, a single black welfare mother and Larry, her handyman brother-in-law. With a forgetful Archie disappearing at night for hours, Sarah turning to shoplifting, and Agnes herself suffering a fall that puts her in hospital – her ability to cope doesn’t look good.

Unable to hold everything in its tight balance by her self, Grandmother and Granddaughter develop a bond that supports this fragile household. Archie is forced to make a life altering decision, and Agnes realizes that she can’t cling to a way of life that’s passed.

But she can create a strong and beautiful new life for those she loves.

The Covenant

Diana Scott
Writing alone and as part of a writing team, Diana has had her short stories broadcast on CBC Radio, a feature script optioned, a MOW commissioned by CTV, and a comedy script showcased by Alibi Unplugged at the 2004 Banff Television Festival.

The Covenant
When 19 year-old Helen becomes a mail order bride to an Alberta Homesteader, it seems like the perfect answer to all her romantic dreams.  But the dream quickly turns into a nightmare.  Her new husband, Daniel, still grieving for his dead wife ignores her, while the eldest daughter resents her mother’s usurper.

After a hail storm destroys their crops, Daniel is forced to leave his family to find winter employment as a miner.  During his absence,  a relationship develops between Helen and their nearest neighbour, Seth, a black American farmer, who is held at arms’ length by the community.  In Seth, Helen finds an intelligent, caring man who will never abandon her.  In Helen, Seth discovers the joy and innocence his life has lacked.

But this is Alberta in 1910. Helen is married and Seth black. There can be no happy ending.

Diorama

Joseph Kay
Joseph was most recently Executive Story Editor and writer (or co-writer) of multiple episodes of the CBC television series This Is Wonderland, where he was fortunate to have been part of story department for the entire run of the series.  Joseph is a 2003 graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, where he attended the Prime Time Television Programme.  In a previous life (from 1997 to 2000), Joseph was a hard-working corporate lawyer at a Toronto Bay Street law firm.  Staring helplessly out the window of his tastefully decorated high-rise office one day, Joseph made the uncharacteristically nervy decision to quit and try his hand at writing scripts.  In 2001, Joseph wrote and co-produced a short film through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Al Waxman Calling Card Program.  The short, titled You Might Be the Youngest, was later screened at film festivals and sold for broadcast on television.  Several of Joseph’s feature film screenplays have received development funding from either The Harold Greenberg Fund or Telefilm Canada.

Ariel Goldblatt
Ariel has worked in theatre, film and television both in Canada and the United Kingdom. Her film psycho killer was awarded the Fuji Film Scholarship and exhibited at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.  Ariel was involved with the first broadcast of the talent competition Pop Idol which has since dominated World Wide markets in various local incarnations.  A graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s CTV Prime Time Program, Ariel spent two seasons as one of the writers on Global Television’s instant drama series  Train 48.   She is currently in development with Triptych Media on the urban comedyWhat The Girl Did Wrong with writing partner Jean Yoon.   The love child of trash culture and high art, Ariel is named after a Shakespearian sprite and not a Disney mermaid

Diorama
Welcome to Hillside High.  The cool kids rule the halls while the strange, quiet kids invisibly suffer. It’s just like any school in any town, except for one thing:  the popular kids keep disappearing.  Have they all left en-masse for the fame and fortune of Hollywood or is something more sinister at work? 

Seth Parker (17) is resigned to be an outcast among the sea of clones.  To make matters worse, his twin brother Luke is everything that he detests: a vapid, football-playing-cheerleader-banging-Coldplay-listening cretin.  Seth meets Fern, a similar outcast.  Plain and awkward, Fern is using this year’s science fair to roll-out her own unique (final) solution to the nasty politics of high school.  Her thesis is simple:  Are high school students inherently evil or are they the unavoidable product of a decayed, corrupt system?  Seth and Fern become tentative friends until he disappears after “volunteering” for her study and a seemingly benign experiment on the practical application of Social Darwinism goes badly awry.

Tranquil

Meghan Ciana Doidge
Writer/Director Meghan Ciana Doidge’s 35mm short film Jilted premiered at The 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival.  Her previous projects include the short filmes Her previous projects include the short films, DIN (Cineworks’ Refuse Rewind Replay Festival 2004), Hopscotch (Berlinale Talent Campus 2004) & Josephine (Cineclix.com).

Upcoming projects include the feature scripts, and hopefully soon to be films, Tranquil, Find Me & White Raven.

Tranquil

An independent film crew breaks into the grounds of the derelict Tranquille Sanatorium to guerrilla shoot an additional scene for their low-budget horror film.  On the way, they meet Connie, a young native girl who is searching for her brother.  While exploring the grounds, one of the actors is suspiciously hurt.  Hal, the Producer, rushes him back into town leaving the remainder of the group stranded as night approaches.

A series of surreal events, including a coyote attack, puts the group on edge.  Connie returns, still without her brother, full of mysterious stories about Tranquille’s checkered past.  They are attacked by a nasty, old, Caretaker.  Burton, the makeup artist, is killed and the remainder of the group panics.  Connie comes to the rescue leading them into foreboding tunnels, but Fikri, the sound guy, goes missing and then, tormented by childhood horrors, he throws himself through a two-story window.

Terror reigns, as one-by-one they are separated from the group and hunted by both the seemingly inhuman caretaker and their own disturbing secrets.  Connie leads Torin, the director, to a torture chamber containing the remains of the caretaker’s past victims.  As the caretaker reclaims his own corpse for the final showdown, Connie also assumes her own skeleton to wreak vengeance on the Caretaker for killing her brother and her over a hundred years before.  The remainder of the group overcome their fears and join with the reanimated corpses to defeat the evil that has trapped them at Tranquille.