The Speed of Life by Doug L. Starks - Drama - Nathan Hails has the perfect life... a great career, beautiful wife, and a wonderful son.  Nathan's life takes a turn for the worst when his son accidentally dies. 78 pages - pdf, format 8)

Please excuse the numbered scenes.  Thank you.

Ok, I finished reading your script.  While I thought the characters were well-developed and the dialogue/descriptions were good, I think your framing device is my biggest worry about the script.

I think the device in which you chose to frame the film is interesting and makes it a completely character-based drama, but it sacrifices some things as well.  Things like art direction (it being one room on a hand-held camera) and cinematography (it being basically stationary).  That's not to say that the film can't work, it just limits it.

I think my biggest problem with the device is the constant cutting to black.  It happens sometimes twice a page and after awhile happens almost every-single-page.  I think this would become rather jarring for an audience and drastically slow the pacing down.  Perhaps you could think of another way to string the footage together?  Or just have it quick cut to the next footage?  Or put a few frames of white noise in to show a split?  I don't want to mess with your artistic intent, so these are just suggestions.

Overall, there are some heart-wrenching scenes in the film.  The death of the child is huge, but I couldn't help but wonder if it would be more powerful if it happened off-screen completely.  If Eli had found the gun, gone off to play with it, and then when Nathan's talking to the camera you hear the shot in the background and hear them running around and screaming.  Either way, it's still the killing of a child, so it's going to get a reaction.

The only other thing I can think of is that the actual "plot" (the death of the son) doesn't occur until over 30 minutes until the film.  I understand why you did this, because you had to build the characters, it being a character-driven film, but that leaves a lot of downtime with "nothing" happening.  I put nothing in quotations because I don't actually consider it to be nothing (b/c of the development), but that's how it might be seen.  Maybe you might want to add more cinematic shots in the beginning.  I noticed that you mix on camera and off, and maybe you could do that more to mix it up a little.

So while I do think the framing could be a problem, I would be interested to see this actually play out on film.  I'm also interested to see how other people react to this on the forum.  I think it's an interesting experiment in the medium that will yield a multitude of reactions.

Thank you Dressel for the in-depth review.  

You are correct about how the story is stationary.  This was to challenge myself and budget reasons.  This is the same for limiting the amount of characters.

I can see how you would think the first act is slow moving.  I wanted to show the simple life of a normal family thrown into a horrible situation.  I found that this is very important to build that up during the first act while throwing in the foreshadowing.  But I agree with you, there does need to be more before the son's death.

I will take your comments into consideration.  

Quoted from anti You are correct about how the story is stationary.  This was to challenge myself and budget reasons.  This is the same for limiting the amount of characters.

I can completely see this film being made, but it'll naturally be made for a low budget.  And with a low budget sometimes comes bad acting.  And being that the film requires amazing acting, it could hurt it in the end.  Hopefully you're involved in some way if this ever gets made to keep a watchful eye.

Quoted from anti I can see how you would think the first act is slow moving.  I wanted to show the simple life of a normal family thrown into a horrible situation.  I found that this is very important to build that up during the first act while throwing in the foreshadowing.  But I agree with you, there does need to be more before the son's death.

I completely agree with you about building them up, so don't sacrifice that if you feel like it'll work on screen.  My main point was that it could probably be done in a little less time.

Yes, the acting is going to make or break this film.  There are so many different emotions that Nathan has to pull off.

Thanks again for your comments.