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This was pretty good. It took a little bit to get to the horror. I can see a few nice jump scares when he starts seeing random horror faces popping up. But not sure if the payoff was set up all that well. Maybe if one of his online friends warned him that the glasses malfunction or something to that effect. Because that malfunction kinda comes out of nowhere. While I wasn't expecting that to happen (which can be good), it still felt like it didn't quite fit. But, nevertheless, a very solid effort. The writing was pretty strong, took me like 2 minutes to read this. But I felt a big chunk of this, perhaps too much of a chunk, was just the unboxing part in front of the Go-Pro, a lot of explaining what the product does in immense detail. And some of those long blocks of dialogue made my head hurt a little...
Quoted Text
FRANNY (CONT’D) (O.S.) Ok, here they are, black carbon fibre, sensors on the outside frame facing front blended in so you can’t see them without REALLY looking at them. Microphones integrated into the bottom of the glass frame so you can make phone calls and use Grape’s “Go Glenda” voice activation and with the patented earpieces used as part of the stalk which actually reverberates against skull behind your ear so you can hear music and phone calls, this is pretty nifty piece of kit. Wait a minute and I’l try them on.
I get that he's excited and probably talking a mile a minute, but some punctuation, outside of commas, might have made that easier to digest.
His conversion to being a killer happened way too quick. I know it’s a short but should have foreshadowed him having some murderous instincts to begin with. Also what is the motivation for the tech to persuade him to murder? Think this needs some kind of explanation. Perhaps the corporation are using him as a test case for suggestibility or something – rather than buying an available product he was a beta tester.
The box-opening video segment was too much information, that could have been tightened up a lot more. Plus points were Franny seemed kind of believable as a naïve geeky chump, and his rapport with his online friends was credible. It hit the brief but needs work. Online manipulation is a big topic so there is scope here. I think it'd be neat if "big data" was somehow behind it.
Oh man, even though the writing was ok I struggled not to just skim read the first 3/4 pages. Wasn't really engaging at all for me I'm afraid.
Picks up once he actually uses the glasses, but even then the change felt way too rushed. Ditch the earlier stuff and focus more on the glasses/horror and I think this would then have some real potential though.
This is very similar to Stephen King's 'End of Watch' (book three of the Mr. Mercedes). The only difference is that you use glasses instead of a tablet with the fishing game.
Count me in on the use of Franny as a boys name. Confusing as heck. You may have had a reason for the name but it's lost on most of us.
Sci-fi box checked, as is the horror aspect. Even a minimal production budget. Good work meeting the requirements.
Firstly I'd like to thank everyone for their insightful feedback, there has been a recurring theme and I have taken it all on board. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to explain my process and reasoning for the script I entered.
Originally the script was 10 pages long so I had to trim quite ruthlessly to get down to six pages. The relationship between Franny, I make no excuses for the name, it's a common nickname for a man named Francis here in Scotland and his father. It explained more why Franny felt it necessary to kill him. But I was torn. The inner geek in me wants to explain the technology more and not the relationship, with the feedback I've had, that was a mistake and I should have trimmed down the tech side of things more. As it's set in the near future, the price of such technology will rise so two thousand dollars is a prediction of cost and as to how Franny makes his money I should have made it clearer he is Youtube (other streaming services are available) streamer and makes his money through advertisement, I mentioned it briefly in the script with the talk of doing an unboxing video. As usual for me and I am working on it, there was some grammatical errors, but with the dialogue, I write as I want to hear the person speak, so some commas where missing but that was intentional to try and relay the breathless excitement Franny had unboxing the glasses. Sorry if it didn't come across that way and I'll work on it in future exercises.
I wrote the piece just a day after reading about the development of Apple Glasses, so there are similarities between what Apple are developing and my own Grape Glasses. The future of technology is always evolving and I think it's only a matter of time before there are technology related psychosis breakdowns, grim but theoretically possible.
Anyway, thanks very much to each of you for taking the time to read and feedback on my work, I really do appreciate every part of it.
Cheers
Owen
If at first you don't succeed........bribe someone.