What I've Done by Brandon Stephens - Short - A wounded female soldier returns home to the life she left behind. In the the aftermath of a distant war, she learns sometimes the war follows you home. 11 pages - pdf, format

Hey Brandon,

Despite being a typical shell-shock story, I have to admit I quite liked this. You've opened up a lot of potential for a dramatic story and I could see it working out well on screen. The ending for me, was a bit anti-climatic, but I'll give more on that later.

First up, you're going to need to include a FADE IN: at the top left hand side of your screen. Don't ask me why, but it's just the industry standard thing to do.

Cindy's intro needs to be in CAPS. Actually, come to think of it, you only introduced one character in CAPS, the rest were lowercase. Remember to introduce all your characters in CAPS. That includes minor characters like the child with the balloon and the neighbor.

Page 1:                           (O.S.)
                George! Get your ass in here!

- Whether we see the character or not, we still need a name, here.

Page 1: "A neighbor calls to his French Bulldog in the front yard, the dog stares at Cindy." - Watch your sentence structure here. "The dog stares at Cindy" should be a stand alone sentence. Don't include two subjects in one sentence, unless the secondary subject is also the object being acted upon. It's a recurring issue throughout your script, so I'll only mention it here. It's one of my pet peeves. Is it important that the dog is a French Bulldog? Try to include the basic details. To me, the breed of the dog isn't important unless it has symbolism attached.

Page 2: Alex and the partyers are laughing, smiling." - Beware of progressive sentences like this. Avoid having verbs ending in "ing" unless it's on the secondary verb. Why not try this, instead...

"Alex and the partyers laugh, smiling." - At the end of the day, you're only cutting one word from the sentence, but you may as well learn that skill now, before you jump into features where every word counts.

Page 3: Watch the spacing with Cindy's dialogue. There's something weird going on there.

Page 4: "FLASHBACK TO" is not a flashback at all. You're returning to the present with that transition. Try using "BACK TO PRESENT" instead.

SPOILER!!!!

As I said above, the ending doesn't work for me. Alex's sudden decision to kill Cindy seems out of place and a bit weird. It almost seems like you're trying to create a resolution that was already there. You're trying to hard to create this "shocker ending that we'll never forget". The twist is there. She's pregnant, that's the twist. Don't try and create this new twist by killing characters off unnecessarily. To me, it makes it a bit anti-climatic... and it doesn't work, IMHO.

Other than those things, I did like it. It's a bit of a generic story, nothing too special, but it does the trick for what it is.

Good work,

Dan

Hey SimplyScripts, thanks for posting. And DanBotha, thanks for reading the script. Thanks for the tips on the "ings", and the sentence structure.

As far as the dog goes, mine is a French Bulldog, that's why that is there but you're right, the breed wouldn't matter if someone else shot this.

SPOILER

As for the ending, I wanted the audience to question whether or not he shot her on purpose or by accident. I'm afraid it doesn't really come across that well on paper, hell maybe not even on film.

I'm currently working on a feature script about female soldiers, so I will keep all of your tips in mind when writing it.

I owe you a read!