The Storyteller by Anthony Carter - Short - An old man who we call The Storyteller wants to tell his niece a story, but which one shall he tell? 3 pages - pdf, format

That reminds me TOTALLY of the old EC horror comics from the 50s.  An evil Alice in Wonderland kind of tale.  This has oodles of visual possiblities.  Well written!

Anthony

I enjoyed this, reminded me of Poe's "The Raven" when the Simpons done a parody of it. It had that macarbre, gothic tone to it, which I liked a lot.

Considering its adapted from a poem of yours I take it that is more your realm then screenwriting, however if you decide to continue writing in this format, there are some rules to watch out for:

- Never use the word camera, we, the audience, etc -- As we are not supposed to be present in any given scene. So never in any circumstances refer to them.

- FADE TO BLACK instead of FADE THROUGH BLACK

- No need for the "CONTINUED (2)"

- Put (V.O) beside the character's name not underneath

- Three to four lines maximum, per paragraph of prose.

We all had to learn these pedantic, nit picky formatting issues starting out & it can be hard to avoid them or even remember them all as some people have different ideas on whats correct formatting then others but over time you'll get to grips with them, if you choose to write more scripts (which of course you should)

Not bad, best of luck with the rewrite.

Col.

This one is a little odd.  It's not got much to it and told in an odd way.  This one isn't for me.

A DARK ROOM should be INT. DARK ROOM - NIGHT

You write a lot of words in capitals which isn't necessary.  Like Col said we're the storytellers and not the director so leave the camera directions out of it.

FADE OUT.

I was going to say that the way you wrote the intro would need to be rewritten but all your intros for new characters need to be corrected.

I think it would be better to name the characters too.  When you write, ...we shall call her niece.  It's not right.

It would be better to start with:

JANE, 5, blonde pigtails, wears a blue dress with white polka dots.  She sits in poorly lit room watching the television.  It's alien antennae obscures her vision as it sweeps down in every direction imaginable.

Also, is there snow inside this place or not?  Why is there snow inside?  And if it isn't what is it really?  And if it's outside, then what's a tv doing outside?

I hope this helps is of some help Anthony.  If you disagree, let us all know.

All the best,


Javier

Thanks for your suggestions and thoughts guys! I really appreciate them. In fact, the reason why I posted this on here is because I'm still learning and I figured, who better to learn from than people who do this for a living?

The thing about "The Storyteller" is that it's not written to make sense. It's written as something that should just be accepted as is like, as Steven8 said earlier, Alice in Wonderland. It strange and odd for the sake of being strange and odd.

The reason why I 'titled' the characters (so to speak) simply NEICE and STORYTELLER is because I felt no need to give them real names. There's only one of them in the script so if I say  NEICE then you know who I'm talking about, same goes for the Storyteller.

Not 'snow' as in precipitation white snow, but 'snow' as in static. I guess I should say static from now on seeing as people seem to misinterpret snow.

This is odd and it isn't for all tastes, nor do I expect it to be. But writing out something like this in poem-like format is probably never going to happen again for me. I wrote the dialogue as poetry because I felt it would help cature the strangeness of the original poem. This is very much just a peice of my wild imagination transferred into words.

Again, thanks for the tips and kind words as well as the formatting tips. There are alot of rules but I guess it's what comes with the territory.