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I found this short to be extremely choppy. You have the main character going from one scene to another, with each one ending with someone doing someone else a favor. There was no flow.
Characterization, I thought, was poor and the dialogue seemed rushed and too on the nose. The characters say exactly what they have to say for the story and that's it. You need more than that.
Read some scripts and see how other people flesh out dialogue.
Also, this was sort of a rip-off of pay-it forward. I read it expecting something different, hoping I was mislead by the title and the logline, but I was let down.
The characters sounded like robots, not because of the words they said but because they were saying _exactly what the audience needed to hear_ to understand the story.
And as for the characterization thing Phil said: Phil, I don't know how one could *really* develop a character in 6 pages. It's possible, I guess, but pretty damn tough.
There were some technical mistakes too. For one, sluglines should be written like this: "INT/EXT. SOMEPLACE - NIGHT/DAY" NOT "INT/EXT-SOMEPLACE-NIGHT/DAY"
Don't put ":"s after the characters' names.
I really didn't like this script. I never could enjoy it at all.
I say, Steve, you should scrap this script, read others on the site until you are trained better, and start again fresh.
I'm not trying to diss you as a writer, I'm just saying you could be A LOT better than you are (I am, of course, basing this opininon on this short alone), that's all.
And as for the characterization thing Phil said: Phil, I don't know how one could *really* develop a character in 6 pages. It's possible, I guess, but pretty damn tough.
I'm going to disagree with you on the characterization comment. You can develop characters in a very short script; you just have to keep the number of characters down to a minimum.
Yup. Like I said, I knew there might be a possibility. Another thing is to have and build one, maybe two main characters in a story and have minor characters only when they're necessary for the plot or even the main character to develop. However, those minor characters all should serve their purpose to the story, maybe such as causing a huge change on the protagonist, or making him discover something new about himself, otherwise they're just "there".
At least that's the way I did it with my script, Insanity Outcome. In a feature this might be a huge no-no, but I think it's the best way to go with shorts.
Still, this script is half the size of mine, so it'd be even harder to pull off. Hell, I'm not even sure if I pulled it off myself.
But we're getting off-subject here. We should be commenting on Returning the Favor here!