I read the first fifteen pages of part one and I thought you could really tighten this script up...a lot!  It took fifteen pages just to set up the premise.  These pages could've been written in five pages.

For starters, you're incorrectly using (beat) in your script.  That's only used when there's a pause between dialogue between people.  You don't use it to establish a pause in one person's own dialogue.  Instead, you break it up with thtree periods... Like this.  Correcting this alone will save you a lot of space... whole lot of space.

It took you five page to explain what happened.  Given the fact that this is a zombie flick, you just needed to explain whether it was a lab virus or radiation from a comet.

I thought that it was kind of funny that, five weeks after the ship hit the sand, Jack starts his journal entry with the very beginning of the zombie infestation.  You could've briefly recapped the story in one or two lines and just start thte story from there.


Phil

BAH!

The opening was completely fine. Yes it was fifteen pages, but it didn't feel like it was fifteen pages. This thing goes so quickly that it's hard to imagine how long the films would run for.

Cheers, Chism.

That's because very little happened in those fifteen pages.

The presidential press conference was completely unneeded

The zombie genre is so well known, you could start a movie with a character walking in front of the camera and shouting, "Fifteen days later!"  Everyone would know where we were at this point.


Phil

That doesn't make any sense.

What doesn't make sense?

Phil

Oh, freak, by the way. One thing that annoyed me was that when they were doing a gladiator style thing with the zombies,  the soldiers kept shooting everyone. That really was annoying and got in the way of what could of been an interesting scene.

While I'm online (real busy right now) I just thought I'd let you know that I finally got around to finishing up a new draft of Chapter Three. It's much better than what I had, I think.

Yo I was just wondering how old you are? and how long you have been writing?

I thought the screenplay was pretty decent, but it's to long.

I'm only a few pages in.

1) Please, delete the first ten pages, they're pointless and a little on the boring side for someone like myself who has seen many zombie films.

2) Don't be so worried about camera angles, thats not your job. Keep the camera angles to yourself unless it has something to do with a plot point, like a newspaper or mysterous person.

More soon...

I read these scripts when they were first put on the site and thought they were one of the best scripts I'd ever read, and not just on this site. In fact I enjoyed them so much I decided to give them another read in 2011, but this time round they seem more flawed than they did. Chapter One is a hugely enjoyable read, thrilling and adrenaline pumping, definitely my favourite in the series by far. I only have one problem with it, although it's quite a big one: None of your characters seem to have much, if any, personality! Jack is obviously the hero of the story, but the audience won't relate to or root for someone as emotionless as him. Throughout the entire film, he doesn't have a single compassionate line. He seems too much of a sterotypical action hero to me, too one-dimensional. Just about all the other male characters appear to be carbon copies of each other, so much so that I find it hard to remember who's who. Jessie... I honestly have no idea why she's there. She's absent for huge chunks of the film, and when she is there she never has more than a couple of lines. Her kiss scene with Jack is unecessary too, as there were no signs whatsoever of any blossoming affection between them before or since. Those are my thoughts on Chapter One, but don't take that to mean I didn't enjoy the script, because I really did! You built suspense brilliantly, and for a 188-page script where a massive chunk of it is them hiding in the school doing nothing, I was never bored. The cliffhanger is absoutely amazing, too. I'm about 65 pages into Chapter Two, so I'll post my thoughts on that one in the near future, although given the fact that these scripts were posted in 2005 and there hasn't been a single comment in 6 years, chances are you've long since moved on and forgotten about this one.