Forgiveness by KenJackson - Short, Drama - Kevin, a career thief, is about to get in way over his head after he steals from the wrong person and his family is kidnapped. The only way Kevin can save his family from death, is to find forgiveness. 12 pages - pdf, format

Hey Ken,

I just read your short. This reads like the beginning of a feature, not a short.

I also think that after it is formatted correctly, you will have twenty or thirty pages.
You have too many blocks of action with many different angles or shots in them. Each block should show one scene only. If the camera looks somewhere else, it should be in another block of description.

There's a lot of misspelled words, too. You might want to go over it with spell checker.

On the positive side, I think you have something here that would work into a pretty good story and script.

Cindy

This does really need an overhaul - as Cindy says above, you need to break up the blocks of description for a start, and sort out some of the typos and formatting problems. Some of the descriptive passages could be simplified.

Usually these sort of things don't matter that much - we all make mistakes - but here I found some of the script difficult to follow because of these problems:"Shown in the photo is Kristen and John holding hands Maggie Miller, 5 years old." Eh? It was only later I realised that this was John's daughter, named after his mother, who we see die at the start of the story. I would avoid having two characters with the same name - it just confuses things as it did in this case (or, if you do, at least make it clear what you are doing!).

A bigger problem is the dialogue though- it just rings hollow. People don't say "Are you alright, little girl" for example. They sound as if they are reading from idiot boards! And we must have the politest gangsters in history here - even the thug on the door comes out with "Come on in. We have been expecting you" - has he watched too many Bond movies? It all just felt unnatural. It also meant that none of the characters sounded different from one another - they all spoke, male, female, gangsters, children, in the same stilted way.

I should also say that, plot wise, it also stretches belief that no one checks if Kevin is armed before he get's to see the gangsters boss!

As mentioned, this does seem to be the start of a feature, rather than a short in it's own right, with the cliffhanger ending. But I would suggest that before continuing you need to sit down and sort out the problems with this.

Sibling rivalry and guilt, with a dash of gangsters, kidnap and revenge thrown in. This does read like the opening of a feature but think you should sort out some of the problems already listed (plus,  I could not see Tony just letting Kevin leave with the child) and maybe raise the stakes for Kevin,

I'd like to know what motivates Kevin. It's a little condusing. If I've got it right, Maggie is Kevin's daughter, but John managed to win Kristen away from him at some point. So what's Kevin's goal? Is it simply to regain his family? But then, if he's lost them already (to John) what has he got to lose if Tony just lets Kevin and the little Maggie go?  

Lots of potential in this script so keep at it.

Best,

H