The Revolutionary by Huidong Lu - Short, Thriller - At the top of a towering building, a desperate man considers the unthinkable, reflecting on his situation as the time to make a decision grows closer.  4 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

The writing here is crisp and atmospheric. I can visualize myself on the rooftop. It's good.

The Cont'ds are distracting, especially as you switch from VO to spoken dialogue. As you've only got one character speaking, we don't really need to know that he's continuing to speak, it is obvious. If you are using Final Draft it sets auto continue on by default, which is frustrating. You can turn them off in the options.

As to the story, I'm confused. (SPOILERS) You lead us down the path that this is a suicide attempt and then the twist is it isn't but some kind of battle. OK, so I like the idea of you switching like that but the way you've executed it doesn't make sense.

There's no point to the VO other than to make the audience believe he's about to jump and therefore it doesn't feel real. Also, why is he there on his own and not in the helicopter with his men? Why put the armband on only at the end and what does the armbands signify? How come the other 'gang' is coming up the stairwell?

You sacrifice a lot to distract the audience, unfortunately that is at the expense of a satisfactory or believable story. However this feels like the beginning of something bigger so maybe flesh it out and give us more of a story without focusing so much on a twist.

I hope my notes have been useful.

-Mark

Hi Huidong,

I'll pretty much echo Marks thoughts.

I did enjoy the writing and the picture you painted.

I also thought he was going to jump, and then the twist happened, but it wasn’t a good twist in the sense that I didn’t see it coming and was surprised. It was just so left field that it wrecked the setup.

Definitely a larger story here. Who are these two opposing groups and what are their motivations?

All the best.

Pretty solid writing.

Quoted Text His voice trails off. He shakes his head. Ends the call.

Don't think you need his voice trails off.

Good effort here

The writing here was good. Very visual, but I'll echo the previous posts...my main issue was the twist. It created more questions for me than anything. So it left me wanting to know how he got to the roof, and where this guy was headed...who he actually was. Feels like its part of something bigger.

Overall, it was pretty good, the VO reminded me of old noir films. I'd say keep at it, you got something here.

Good luck to you.

Wow, I didn't think this would get any responses, haha. This was supposed to be about a man fighting against a highly authoritarian government. At this point, it's a losing battle and he's considering just taking himself out. However, he scraps that idea and decides on one last stand.
I could see how that didn't come off so well in the script, though.
Thanks for reading it, everybody!

More than welcome