Cycle by Brennan Scott - Short, Drama - A woman commits a heinous crime, as there's a knock at the door… 7 pages - pdf, format

Hi Brennan,

There’s nothing worse than a heinous crime!

We open with you telling us we open. The missing FADE IN would tell us this is the opening.

Overuse of capitalisation.  At the most you capitalise the name of the character when they are introduced (along with a basic description, which is missing here) and then capitalisation (in some scripts) is used to emphasize sounds or important objects. However, if your script is written well, it should be obvious when a sound is a sound or when some object is important to the story.

For example, if I wrote, “The TELEPHONE started RINGING”, do I really need to? If I wrote, “The telephone started ringing”, will the sound engineer not pick up that they need to add a ringing sound unless I SHOUT it out?  

In your script you are using capitalisation to emphasise actions as well, or random words like BREATH which really isn’t needed.  

You are telling us what we see or do not see instead of showing us. “We do not see the victim as Heather slows to a halt.” If you haven’t described the victim, then we haven’t seen them, there’s no need to tell us.

Try to scale back on parentheticals. Again, if your action and dialogue is written in the right way, you won’t need them. You are basically telling the actors how to act with these parentheticals when that’s their job.

CUT TO’s can be cut also. The new scene heading implies by its very existence that there has been a CUT TO.

The dialogue feels a little off, more like you are talking to the audience than two people having a natural conversation. It’s OK, just needs a bit of work. I didn’t buy the sudden urge for the bathroom or the barging in the bedroom. This seems a little forced just to get the two into the bedroom.

Another example of telling instead of showing – “Meg is obviously confused by Heather’s reactions”. How is she obviously confused? Does she frown? Does she say something? If we were watching this right now, what would she be doing to get across to the audience her obvious confusion?

You don’t need CUT TO BLACK or THE END, just a FADE OUT.

As for the story, a bit of a deranged Groundhog Day scene. It didn’t make sense but then again this is a short and doesn’t necessarily have to. Not bad, easy to film and cheap. Just tidy it up, make it seem more natural and it should be fine.

I hope my notes help.

-Mark

It looks childish to me when sounds are placed in uppercase. Even worse are sound effects that are actually spelled out like in a comic book. TWANG. BOING. SHHHLURRRRRP!

Brennan,

Some notes.

There is a certain power in repetition, but it can quickly wear thin.  Not showing the victim in the opening scene pretty much gives away the reveal.  I would suggest showing part of the victim, maybe the legs, which would tease and confuse the audience.  And I don't buy that Meg is coming over to fight over a role.  It may well come to that, but how many people show up knowing they're going to have a row?  So, you might consider a bait and switch scenario.  Meg shows up for some reason and then the whole conversation goes south.  And Heather should work much harder to keep Meg out of the bedroom.  What would you do if you had a dead body in the bedroom?  I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone in if I could help it.  The bathroom would be non-functional, and the super is on his way.  Anything to keep someone out.  And of course, Meg manages to get in anyway.  

And when Meg shows up again, we know Heather is a wack job.  What is real?  who knows.  

Best
Richard

Sorry I got to page 3 and called  it quits.

This is riddled with formatting errors. The dialogue is on the nose, I just struggled to get through it.

I would recommend reading more scripts, a lot more.

Good luck with it.