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Adam and Sam by Boaz Asaasira - Short, Drama - After a long period of abuse by her step mom, Adam runs away from home to find his biological mom but his young sister 6 years old keeps on following him. Ended up living on street trying to find their mom. 7 pages - pdf, format
Hi Boaz, Nice little twist but I find one problem. I don't see how the father could be out to lunch after his kids have just ran away.
I am not sure if you are new at this but A great effort. I have a few mentions which might help you with a rewrite: I found that you use their name quite a lot, you can cut that back by shortening the action lines and running a few of them together as one sentence. there are a few grammatical errors and you have a lot of actions ending in "ing" try to avoid these and run with the present. Such as, they are running or they are watching simply bring it back to, they run and they watch...and so on.
good luck! Elisabeth
Oh and by the way. Please fix your title's spelling
Boaz, I read the script and there is a good story here. English is not your first language, I can tell, but I thought you did very well. The format is very good and the story is fine. Just a few spots where your english made it a little confusing. I didn't actually understand that they had ran away til the end. With just a little work this can be a really good script. Marvin.
My main concern was that this is very generic and bland. All the characters have Western names - Adam, Sam, Steven, Sophie. Apart from a mention of a "20 peso note" there is no sense of place - this could be London or New York, or anywhere.
It would have been nice just to have a sense of location - that this is set in the Philippines, with the local culture reinforcing the story.
The story, such as it was, didn't do much for me - two children run away to look for their mother. They fail to find her, and the wicked step-mother turns a blind eye when she sees them. It was more a series of incidents than a story, and the lack of resolution means that it just comes to an end.
I would really suggest that what you need to do is relocate this clearly to your own city and country, pour in as much local colour as you can, and get yourself an ending! Even if it is just them returning home to find no one has noticed they've gone (and Adam plotting another adventure for the next day) - it needs something better than just to peter out like this.
This is really a sad story, I can feel the hardship that Adam had gone through. The story is very solid and I liked it.
Story I liked the setup where you showed us visually that Adam is trying to look for his real mom. The thing that I would change is going to Sunset Apartment at the end rather than in the beginning. That would keep us reading to see whether Adam will find his mom. Because the way it is now, there is nothing to anticipate after the Sunset Apartment scene. Not that the "stealing bread" and "seeing Sophie" scenes aren't good, but they don't move the story forward since we already know Adam didn't find his mom.
Characters I liked both Adam and Sam. Adam is a very caring brother. I despised Sophie. So I think you achieved what you wanted.
Dialogue Some dialogues can be cut out. For example
SOPHIA I knew I've been missing money!
Sophia already stated that she think Adam is a thief beforehand, so you don't need to say what Sophia is missing.
Another example:
SOPHIA How many times have I told you to leave my things alone!
If Sophia already knew that Adam is trying to steal things from her handbag, why would she say that to Sam?
During the "stealing bread" scene, you might want to add some dialogue because it feels like reading a book. You can have the man yelling something at Adam. You had a lot of action on that page.
Writing Passive verbiage is a problem. You can usually replace all those "ing" endings to present tense verbs. Some sluglines are used incorrectly and are missing. For example, I don't think there is such a thing as INT. STREET. What you want is actually inside a shop. You also need an INT. COFFEE SHOP slug when Steven starts talking to Sophie.
On page 4, you said " She is hold a bag on her shoulder". I think you meant She is holding a bag on her shoulder.
I don't like the fight between Steven and Sophie on page 4, how it just randomly transitions into a fight.
On page 4, you wrote, "jeepneys are pass by." Don't really know what jeepneys are but that is definitely a typo. Should be, "jeepneys pass by."
On page 4, you show that Adam bought bread and water for Sam, but you don't tell where he bought it. It simply just says,
"Adam pulls out some money from his pocket with a smiling face. Sam smilies bigger. Adam buys some bread and water and gives it to Sam."
Say he goes over to a stand or something and say something more realistic than bread and water, do they even sell that on the streets? try a hotdog or pretzel.
On page 6, "Adam gets into his feet" Should be gets onto.
Overall, it's a story that has been told many times before. I see that your trying to draw sympathy for your characters, which can work, but I felt like it made the characters too "perfect" almost flawless, especially the relationship between adam and sam. You really need to proofread better too, at least give it a good scan. Hope this helped.
I felt the story suffered from a case of we've-seen-this-a-thousand-times-before syndrome, nothing too original going on here. The opening scenes were decent and got me interested, the dialogue read natural and genuine however as the script progressed your prose was let down by poor grammar, lack of punctuation and inappropriate capitalisation. This will all come in time though with reading lots of scripts and through your own writings.
A lot happens in the seven pages, too much time passes which are lost in the repeated paragraphs of descriptive. I appreciate you are going for images rather than words and if this were to be made it could be interesting and possibly work fine with less dialogue but you need to structure it better on the page for certain emotions an body languages to stand out.
On a technical note, try and limit the use of of "ing", for example:
"A typical middle class home. SAM, an adorable little girl, is sitting on the floor playing with a stick of lipstick and a makeup compact."
"Adam is watching from inside the house."
-- Instead of "is sitting" or "is watching" just write "sits" or "watches". You'll find this works in a lot of cases where you are using verbs. It helps the flow of the read and conserves that precious paper space. It may seem like a small thing but its a good habit to adopt.
Also I would always age your characters, speaking ones anyway. Just add the age in parenthesis after the name. Again its a small thing but good practice nonetheless.
In a lot of cases you described exchanges between characters rather then actually scripting them; like when Sophie scolds Sam at the beginning and Adam hassles a man a little harder for money when he is begging. These two parts require dialogue instead of just telling us something is happening.
Overall, I think 7 pages is too short to tell such a story, we don't know enough about these characters, which is directly down to the lack of dialogue spoken so its hard to know what these people are about. Adam and Sam sort of float from one scene to the next, like a series of set pieces rather than an actual narrative. Again this could work brilliantly if filmed, using real locations and that but on page it just fall a little flat and disengaging.
As I said I see what you are trying to do here, it has the making of a powerful, gritty film dealing with abandonment, familial bonds and loss of innocence it just needs a more developed, coherent story and structure to suck the reader in and make the whole thing more readable.
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Adam and Sam
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