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SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board  /  Short Sci Fi and Fantasy Scripts  /  Winters Past - Filmed!
Posted by: Don, February 22nd, 2018, 10:19am
Winters Past by Tony Moore - Short, Sci Fi, Thriller - A Britain devastated. ‘The Fire’ has ripped apart the world. The street drug Utopium allows for individuals to relive past memories at the cost of slowly destroying their minds. Can Hendric, a man trying to remember the death of his sister, uncover the disturbing truth whilst trying to surviving trapped inside the brutal drug den of a psychotic underworld leader? 20 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work


Posted by: FrankM, February 24th, 2018, 10:23pm; Reply: 1
This looks like a shooting script, so I'm not up on the nuances of that format. The scene headers that are numbered four times and the character lines that end in "(CONT'D) (cont'd)" don't seem right, though. The sluglines should probably say CONTINUOUS instead of CON'T, but people will understand what it means.

Story-wise, I don't get why any of the characters are where they are. I get why Hendric decides to end that hell-hole once he learns the truth and his only friend is gone, but I do not get why Hendric and Deb were there in the first place. Looked like they were relatively safe by the river (only relatively, there was after all that minor issue of an unsolved murder). And what does Rikter get from collecting all the tribute? Does he barter it with the "uncivilized freaks" for food or raw materials? Is he self-sufficient but on a warped power trip? Basically, I don't understand how Utopia fits into the world.

Format-wise, a few times characters are heard before they are introduced. This is tough to fix, since you don't want to be using something generic like FEMALE VOICE all the time just to switch it a line later. This came up once in a recent script for me... here was the way I did it, and no one seemed to notice it was out of order:


Quoted Text
INT. FORTRESS HALLWAY - NIGHT
Roland drags an unconscious soldier into a side room, closes the door. O.S. FOOTSTEPS of several soldiers approaching. Roland opens the door to duck into the side room, pauses upon hearing a familiar voice.

DOUGLAS (O.S.)
We are going to go over every inch of this fortress top to bottom.

Roland closes the door, remains in the hall. SIR DOUGLAS SUNIL (28), a brawny red-head in blue-trimmed armor, rounds the corner into view.


Minor quibbles:
All of the slugs for the bathroom should probably be UTOPIA - BATHROOM.
On page 5, "In his other hand" dangles without being completed.
On page 14, UTOPIAN in a slug instead of UTOPIA.
Posted by: Don, July 16th, 2018, 10:15am; Reply: 2
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