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A Place For Friends by Michael Rhodes (mazmik) - Short, Sci Fi, Fantasy - A Teenage girl finds her former social internet life catching up with her. 12 pages - pdf, format
I hope some of what I have to say helps you for future screenplays. Other members here I think would be really harsh on this.
1. Your slugs are backwards. You put location, then time of day. It should look like this.
EXT. VILLAGE - DAY
Your slugs change in format a few times.
2. When you introduce a character CAP their name. GEMMA, not Gemma. Give us their age descriptor right off the bat, so we get a sense of what they look like.
3. Write in the present, lose ing words. Wearing turns to wears.
4. Take out words that are not needed. Things like begins to, or starts to. Just write the action. Frees up space, less clunky for reader.
5. Take out things like "We see her".
6. A lot of formatting issues makes me thing you are new to screenwriting. You have a slug in between a fade out and fade in, which makes no sense. How can we be in this place if we are in darkness?
I had a hard time following some of this. The phone conversation off the bat though me off. Didn't know what you were trying to do.
I would suggest reading some script, get formatting down, then give this another go. No one will want to read a script if there are so many formatting errors. No matter how good a story may be, if the person has trouble reading it, they won't finish.
Hi and thanks for the partial read. You are correct, I am new to this, in fact this is the first draft of my very first screenplay ever. I am learning and I will take on all your comments, I think I was a little premature is showing this but I was excited. I will take it back to the drawing board and maybe you will like it a little better next time. well I hope so anyway. Thanks again and best wishes Mike
In film - nothing is impossible
A PLACE FOR FRIENDShttp://www.simplyscripts.com/scripts/APLACEFORFRIENDS.fdr.pdf
Yeah, Mike, lots and LOTS of problems going on here on pretty much every single line. Nothing you can't overcome and fix up, though.
You labeled page 1 as "2", which is obviously incorrect. You don't actually want to even label the first page, start with 2, on Page 2.
Slugs are awful and need immediate attention. Be specific. Slugs can be your friends and can convey so much info in that single line.
Your opening 1 sentence passage is really bad, sorry to say. Don't write long, run-on sentences like this. Be snappier, shorter, easier to read. Only write what cn be seen on the screen, everything else is called an "unfilmable". Stay away from "telling" us stuff that we won't see or know from watching a filmed version.
Describe your characters when you first intro them, not later. Don't worry about what they're wearing unless it matters to the script, or is somehow funny, unique, or character-building.
Keep in mind that 1 page of text equals 1 minute of film. If you think about this, you'll probably see what's wrong with your third 1 sentence passage. Don't worry about transitions unless they really add something to the script..usually, they don't.
I want to stress that you really need to fix up these run-on sentences, as they read just terribly.
Read all the scripts in here that you can. Comment on them, whether or not you feel you're qualified to. Just say what you like and don't like. You can learn alot, bot good and bad, and by reading and commenting more, the more reads and help you'll get in return.
Welcome aboard and enjoy it here. Lots of great people who can help in many different ways.
Hi While it is a good effort, I agree that it needs a lot of work. The formatting, grammer & punctuation are obviously huge, but the thing that kept me from finishing it was the unfilmables (like the one below) that Dreamscale talked about. They're everywhere and they're really distracting, IMO.
"The forest seems to be closing in on her but Gemma doesn’t mind, she feels a pressure on her shoulder, she looks and sees a tree branch resting on her shoulder, she hears her name being spoken but it sounds ‘wrong’ and distant."
Hi Dreamscale and rdhay, Thanks so much for looking at this for me, I really do need to work at this, but every journey starts with the first step. Back to the drawing board for me see you in a few months maybe Thanks again Mike
In film - nothing is impossible
A PLACE FOR FRIENDShttp://www.simplyscripts.com/scripts/APLACEFORFRIENDS.fdr.pdf
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A Place For Friends
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While it is a good effort, I agree that it needs a lot of work. The formatting, grammer & punctuation are obviously huge, but the thing that kept me from finishing it was the unfilmables (like the one below) that Dreamscale talked about. They're everywhere and they're really distracting, IMO.
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