Voice Assisted Homicide by Glenda-the-glass-hole - Short, Sci Fi - Franny loves his geek life and his reliance on it leads to murder. 6 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Definitely doable within a low budget I reckon and there is sci-fi and horror, so checks there.

I just struggled with this. The first three pages are all exposition. Nothing really happens until page 4 and then WHAM! He suddenly becomes Michael Myers through putting on a VR headset for a few seconds.

It just doesn't work for me. Maybe start a lot later with him trying the headset on around page 1 straight after a quick delivery. Ditch the opening the package Youtube thing, it's dullsville.  Then you have a few pages to get creative,  see him become warped over time through the searches and games the VR guides him towards, resulting in him transforming into a killer.

Anyway, just a suggestion, good luck with it.

-Mark

Alright, miss glass-hole,

Technology, it’s in there alright, horror? Maybe More just imagery and gore, it came a bit late. Another thing that I’ve commented on before, but I again feel is relevant here, there’s no real character depth in Franny so it’s really hard to build the conflict that hooks the reader in and poses questions and motivation.

I’m not sure we need the massive dialogue chunks, show us the glasses in operation and save the page space. Right now he puts them on and just does what he’s told, show us the fight of instinct against their dictation, it should be a struggle as currently he could (so far as I can tell) just take them off and send them back.

Basically he has to be brainwashed, or addicted to them. I’d suggest possibly they reward him somehow, and if he’s a bit of a loser then he has to decide between the glasses and his former life.

Anyway, it didn’t really work for me and there’s some scene formatting issues and a few typos chucked in. BUT, if you manage to work with the character at the heart and really challenge him, motivate him to do wrong, it could be a really good little short!

Well done on entering,

Cam

Loved the creepypasta vibe to this. Good job.

Franny is an odd name for a male character. Gave me a double-take the first time I saw “he.”

Quoted Text FRANNY Genuine, two thousand dollar Grape Glasses, I’ve waited three

Two-thousand-dollar

Quoted Text GLENDA How can I help you.

Needs a ?

Okay, I liked this. My only gripe is that you start with the glassed two late in the script. Therefore we go through first time on to instant murder which seems to fast.

I'd shorten the time it takes to put those glasses on and gives us a little  more of him struggling against the demon's wishes.

Nice job overall. A good one

I liked this, enjoyable and hit the criteria.

My issue with it are that I don't think the unboxing stuff is remotely useful to the script and feels like padding. You could lose about 2 pages and use it to better explain why/how the glasses hypnotise him.

Franny as a boys name threw me too.

Good effort.

I’m not usually that bothered by format but you have several scenes start in new rooms without transitions and Harry wasn’t introduced etc

Scripts can be rushed in these owc

Ok, to the story. A new tech, glasses, start to control and manipulate its owner and coerce him into killing etc

I think the obsessive power, the manipulation are decent themes. The quick change seemed to jar a bit and I’m wondered whether he could be shown to have fears, paranoid thoughts etc which the glasses play on. Also more conflict with father.

Got potential

A guy's name is Franny.  Hokey dokey.


Darth Vader theme is actually The Imperial March. No matter - it's a piece of copyrighted music.

Quoted Text Franny runs upstairs to his bedroom, science fiction posters adorn the walls, games consoles and computers spread across the room.

It doesn't say the door is open, but I'll assume it is. When he ENTERS you'll need the FRANNY'S ROOM subhead. (it's in the scene that follows)

O.S. should be V.O.  in regards to other gamers we can only hear.  Franny's father's O.S> is fine. By the way, the gamer pals are right- the Grape Glasses are a bit pricey and a three month wait to boot. Franny,I reminded myself, is 26 yrs old, still living at home (?) and buys a product worth two thousand dollars.  Even if he is on the heavy side and lazy, that's two thousand dollars on a product!  If he got it off his father's dime, he should not bitch about assisting his father for a few minutes. It's not much, but yeah, of course his father's pissed.

Two thousand dollars!  for a piece of tech. I could buy it if he was self-employed, living in a apartment or trailer alone. But not when he's living with his folks. Someone's going to say "Maybe you should buy your own food. Buy your own stove and microwave!" No. Harry says later "you should have gotten larger glasses" hokey dokey.



Maybe instead of Franny giving us the exposition about assembly (and not following directions no less) maybe an INSERT of the instructions, and a montage of him putting together the tech. Most tech isn't tough to assemble once instructions are followed.

Quoted Text Franny stands and looks around his room, picking up a large DARTH MAUL metallic statue he walks downstairs.

Picks up a Darth Maul statue. Heads downstairs.

The statue,possibly a Hot Toy, doesn't have the impact as a knife or...a weapon that fires from the glasses, let's say and melts Harry's brain, fries his eyes, hey...it's worth two thousand dollars, might as well.



Not a horrible entry, but it seems routine.

Hi writer,

Pretty good futuristic tale of Patricide, kind of a Son of Sam thing, only it’s AI via something we would all (most likely) voluntarily strap to our faces without a care in the world. I think those things (app glasses) are most likely going to go viral once they iron out the kinks and get everybody onboard with a neuvo look. No way, you say…? Got a cell phone in your pocket? Yup, same amount of bio control, even if you can’t see it, the signal is always there, feeding into and off of your biometric pattern.

It’s scary actually, cause the apps can put all kinds of shit in your field of view that may seem to be inoculate at first, but do some serious mind altering damage after prolonged use, including hypnotizing you into a state of rage, depression, or… murder?

Creepy tale, well written. Seems like you have a firm grasp on techno-speak as well; the video blog came off as quite legit, even if we’re talking about something not quite there yet. Best of luck

Even though I liked the unboxing, I'd recommend ditching it. The quicker you can get to him booting up those glasses the better.

The pages you would gain are better served setting up why it's so easy for him to follow the instructions... or, if it's not easy, show us that instead.

Good idea. But, needs another pass.

Excellent. The only thing I might work on is having Franny put up more resistance when Glenda tells him to kill his father. Maybe have a POV showing us that Franny no longer is seeing the world the same as before the glasses.

I like this idea probably better than anything I've read so far... BUT... Franny goes from normal to willing to kill his father in about 30 seconds of screen time. I think we need to see Franny verbally abused more. And I think PK hit it on the head when he said you sacrifice valuable screen time describing the coolness of the device instead of getting to where it controls Franny's mind. Too much time spent on describing the product and not enough on character development.

Oh, and not to hijack the thread, but a word on the character's name since I've seen a lot of people comment on the maleness of "Franny." I had an uncle named Gene. We called him uncle "Geney". He served in Vietnam I had an uncle named Charles whose nickname was Chick and we called him Uncle Chicky. It's a natural thing sometimes to put a "y" on the end of a name.

AJR

Story:  Pretty good.  A decent blend of future tech combined with some mixture of horror.  Creepy ending. Not sure I buy how fast Franny (this is a boy’s name?) succumbs to Glenda’s overtures, but it works in the end.

Characters: Franny is a perfectly described dork and plays out his part as described.  A bit weak-brained for a nerd, but I guess that’s why he susceptible to Glenda.

Dialogue:  Okay.  Wasn’t distracting in any way, so that was good.

Writing:  Parts of this appeared a bit rushed, with some missing words and grammatical errors.  Overall, pretty decent writing on display.

Meeting the challenge:  Think it succeeds on the challenge.    

I think Franny (short for Francis) is a cool choice for the character you created.
Ah, okay, I thought (had to read back) this was a kid.  He doesn't read as twenty-six to me - he charges to the door, runs up the stairs, he's excited, slams doors - I was sure he was a slightly overweight foppish nerd kid. I think it might read more horrifically (considering what he ends up doing) if he's a bullied kid who's a clever little Geek - I dunno, maybe 10 years old?  Kids turned evil are a lot more entertaining imho.

Give him some proper justification for his actions turning homicidal too. Example: abused by his father, bullied by online pals. You'd need just a touch more backstory there to show it.

So, I think ditch the unboxing - you obviously included this so you could extol the virtues of the device and what it can do, but I think you could do that with much more brevity. Perhaps the device advertises itself as one thing and then as with your story it becomes something more sinister. Use the freed up pages to get us to the device going rogue much sooner.

Bravo! You came up with a Future Shock tech device, and you weaved in the horror.
Nice job, writer.

Not a big fan of Franny’s dialogue. It’s a nitpick, but little things like “they’ve finally got here” and “these things of absolute beauty” sound like a non-English speaker trying to speak English.

Not huge on his exposition commercial either.

The premise of future glass tech that slowly convinces a man to kill isn’t bad for a feature or an episode of Twilight Zone/Black Mirror, but it’s too much for a short. We didn’t need 2 pages of him doing a commercial for the product only for the twist to be rushed like that.

Haha, "Grape".

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.

Anyway, nice work!

-- Michael

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.

Good luck.

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