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SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board  /  Short Scripts  /  The Red Rider
Posted by: Don, August 22nd, 2007, 10:39pm
The Red Rider by Chris Halvorson - Short, Horror - This is the Red Rider about a ghost who haunts his family. 13 pages - rtf, format 8)
Posted by: MarkC, August 23rd, 2007, 10:11am; Reply: 1
Hey Chris.  Seems a lot of Ghost Rider influence here.  I didn't actually finish the script as it seems to lose itself somewhere in the middle.
Are you writing this with the intention of being the director?  You should leave out things like "we zoom in" e.t.c these are the director's choices.

adding things into the dialogue in brackets like(he's looking around and he talks very sternly) (little kid voice) (normal) e.t.c - these should all be done outside the dialogue area.  For example -

Blake looks around

                                                                                                                         BLAKE EASTWOOD
                                                                                                            Where's the nearest Sheriff's Office?

(Forgive the formatting lol)

Try breaking down some of your wording like "he looks at lockers and for some reason, he sees a shadow".  Breaking it down to "he looks at lockers and sees a shadow" makes it faster to read.

In the plane scene, when Franco flies out the window, there would be a lot of suction happening up there but there seems to be none.

Also who is flying the plane?

It all seems rather quick.  An OFFICER is interrogating Jason, his mum comes in and says your innocent because the judge said and they go? There would be a lot more to it than that.  

Jason says "this is what I call :"THRILLING!".  There's no need to use the ":" nor the quotation marks.

Todd's house?!?  Did they not run into Jason's house?

It seems very confusing here Chris.  "At the party there was tons, but when the cops came they left, so Red rider would just kill what's left".  It really makes little sense here.  

I didn't actually read anymore from there but I like the idea behind the story.  Perhaps doing a second draft and looking into some of the things I mentioned.  

Hope this helps.
Posted by: Soap Hands, August 23rd, 2007, 5:22pm; Reply: 2
This was interesting.

I found a lot of it pretty funny, the stuff I think you meant to be funny and some stuff I'm not sure about, any way I took it pretty lightly. I also have a pretty deranged sense of humor so I found the over the top violence pretty amusing.

Like the other poster said you have some formatting problems, and this is a little wired coming from me but you also have quite a few grammar problems. I noticed a couple of instances where the verbs didn't agree and some sentences where the structure seemed awkward.  

I'm a fan of westerns but the Red Rider character was kind of ehh... for me. I kind of like the name, nice "Red River" reference if you intended that. I thought his motivation was pretty funny, and they way he came out with it bluntly I thought was amusing. His mindless violence was also funny and enjoyable.

I got lost in the middle of the script, it seemed to jump around too much. I don't get why he was trying to kill Tod, or who Tod was. A lot of the script seemed very hurried, the jumping around a lot, it gave a lot of it a kind of slap stick feel, which added to some of its funniness but also made it hard to follow.

I think this could use a lot of work and polishing if you're going for the kind of campy over the top violence thing I think you're going for, if you are going for something more serious this is going to need a lot of reworking in my humble opinion, because I found a lot of it funny.  

The best advice I could give you, besides working on the formatting and grammar, is to flesh out your characters more and give them better, more thought out motivations(except maybe if you intend it to be that campy) and have better pacing a lot of it seemed rushed, and while I think it useful sometimes for that slapstick stuff I think you do it too much.
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