Qubes by Mark Newton - Short, Thriller - After inheriting his parents business, a man discovers a dark family secret with the help of a mysterious cube puzzle. 12 pages - doc, format 8)

Hi Mark,

I don't know if this is your first attempt at this, but I've read the first 12 pages, and this is my thoughts so far.

P2 is completely blank - Maybe a issue with the formatting tool on your programme?

Starting on P3 (and continuing throughout) are load of camera/shot instructions - I made this mistake when I started out. It's generally frowned upon, and you should avoid doing this unless it is extremely necessary.

P3 When a character is first introduced, use CAPS. Even though you've introduced Robert to the reader, his first line is headed as 'Man'. This is very confusing to the reader, as if there is some other mystery character in the scene.

Also Stafford is not properly introduced, again labelled as 'Man'.

The voice over when Robert is reading the letter would benefit from having 'Robert's Mother (V.O.)', or something along those lines.

P7 Spelling error, as Robert is 'playing wit the block'.

But most importantly of all, the action scenes are huge, huge blocks of text (another mistake I used to make all the time). Break them up a little, whittle them down. It looks daunting when the reader is confronted with massive paragraphs like this.

I don't mean to sound harsh, and I believe there could be a very intriguing little story here, If this is your first attempt then that's fine, everyone leaving feedback (as negative as is sounds) really does help you to get your head around things- trust me on this!

I wish you all the best, I'll read the rest soon (or maybe hang fire until you've had a play around with it)

Craig

I would basically echo Craig's comments above. Because of the large blocks of text, I found this a very hard read - more like a short story than a screenplay in places.

I would just add that you don't need to number the scenes - this tends to happen only in the shotting script stage (unless you intend this as a shooting script, which would account for the large amount of camera directions).

I would also say that nowadays, any script is best served by being in a pdf format. This means it can be sent to anyone without any problems with formatting - I had a few problems opening this due to not having Word on my laptop, and had to convert it to Open Office.

pdf convertors can now be downloaded free from the net, and Open Office includes a pdf export feature as standard now.

If you use freeware such as Celtx, which can be downloaded in minutes, you can also save as pdf and it will help with the formatting as well. Online sites such as Zhura, Scripped and FiveSprockets, all free to join, also have these kind of features.

Although I felt that there was definitely a interesting story here, I did feel that the issues highlighted made it difficult to fully appreciate. I note that you have "final draft" on the title page - but I would suggest that you might like to make some revisions to the script yet.