Dead Air by Les Thompson - Drama - A murder mystery set in an Australian regional radio station. A popular morning host who creates controversy falls to his death down a steep staircase leaving nothing behind Dead Air for his listeners.  - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Good morning. I'm going to read it over time. It's a busy two months coming up, but will fit it in. Just some quick notes that don't need page numbers going to it.

It looks like you have added some elements of a shooting script to this by numbering your scene locations. Save this copy, so if you need the number version you have it, but start another that has the numbers removed for easier reading.

Create a title page and dump all the fat at the top of the page and simply begin it with a "fade in:". People are just custom to reading it that way and will get right into the story.

You have double and triple spaces between dialogues or actions, and it just needs to be single-spaced. I'd give page numbers but every few pages you will see it.

You have parentheticals flushed left under character's names. Center them under the names and edit them to be shorter or use it in the action description. Simplify it. less is more, that kind of thing. Page 18 is the first one. The "(annoyed)" is too left.

                           CALLER (V.O.)
(annoyed)
             To the family next door, of course!

I'll get back when I can. This is just a quick note with some basics.

Oh, something I just learned too, use only day or night in location slugs, if it is morning, sunset, full moon, or whatever use that in the description.  


  

I already mentioned a couple of these and page 18.  Below are example page numbers where you skip spaces and punctuation. Go through and close up the spaces. There are some throughout the script.

Page 5: Middle of page: There is no description between the same character’s dialogue when Sue speaks. And you skip a space before Mike speaks just below Sue.

Page 6: Towards the bottom you skip a space and the paragraph of description is really long. You can break it up.

Page 9: Towards the top, you skip spaces when the waiter speaks and before Mike speaks.

Page 11: At the very top of this page you put a period and a question mark at the end of Sue’s dialogue.

The following examples are where areas are not formatted properly. Parenthesis, or parentheticals, are flushed left instead of with the character’s dialogue. Also, there are places where the description is formatted and where the dialogue should be.

Page 17: Towards the bottom, you format the Larry Thomas description as if it is dialogue and you skip some space before he speaks.

Page 18: You flush parentheticals to the left instead of placing them with the character. You also skip spaces where there should be no skipping.

The above examples, especially the parenthetical formatting and the line skipping happen throughout the screenplay and are not hard to spot. Also, some paragraphs of the description are a bit long.

By cleaning up the spaces your script will shorten, but breaking the long paragraphs up for easier reading will probably keep it around the same length.

I was going to give page-by-page notes, but it's pretty easy to spot these issues by just scanning the script. I believe by cleaning it up it will be a lot easier to read and will allow the story to be understood better and allow someone fewer hurdles when trying to give you notes about the story.

If you're having a program issue hit me up, I pretty recently got into the different programs out there and had issues when converting files where it screwed my format. Also, if you clean it up, get back to me I'll read it for the story.  

Without even seeing these formatting snaggins, I'm pretty sure that this is a doc conversion produced from a win SP template by either a 32bit Adobe set up or an online pdf converter.
My main writing PC runs Xp. It's not connected to the internet purposely so that I can't dwindle away the hours in "I'll just look that up" scenarios. This laptop used to run Vista - now it's Linux mint. It saves on the landfill !! Best JtF