Insignificance by Gerard Crefin - Series, Comedy - Everyday themes of love and loss, trust and betrayal, survival and defeat etc. are explored in a dynamic, half-hour journey of short 'sketches' linked by ambient/piano music. 27 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hi Gerard.

So i just read the screwdriver and I want to offer some suggestions -

Firstly your action scenes are too bulky and over discrptive in a a sense that you are telling us stuff we cannot see. So for me you should be showing a visual and not telling about the make of scredrivers and their functions. we cannot see that in script terms.

EXT?INT House is better than too many sluglines. We can see what's happening here.

Also I wouldn't use a beat as a parenthetical. Pause does the job.

Beat.

The narrative itself was not remarkable but well told. I like the little disagreement at the end. It was petty but provokative and reminded me of when a certain boiler man came to my house once and gave me his life story.

Just some cleaning up to do methinks.

I liked Friends. Another thought provoking every day life situation.


Really good little shorts. Totally encaptures the life around us. I must admit I do enjoy short drama's. Good luck and thanks for sharing.

Hi Gerard, read through it and I mostly agree with Shakespeare's take on it.

Except one thing: a Pozidriv is a kind of screwdriver, not a specific brand. (It's an improvement on the Phillips screwdriver.)

And I'm burning to know if there was brown tape on Sean's Pozidriv when it was first put down. The story also reinforces the old adage amongst technicians: "There is no job so small that it doesn't require all of your tools."

While some scenes call for lots of action between bits of dialog, you need to split them into narrative beats (think of how you'd split it into frames of a comic book) of four lines of less. Five max if something can't get split... like introducing a main character.

This adds some white space to the page and gives the reader a sense of pacing.

Many of your wrylies/parenthicals ought to come out as action lines. That helps break up the page visually. As a purely formatting issue, wrylies are not inline with the dialog, but a separate element and start on their own line. Jay's lines at the end of page 22 are done correctly. There's an occasional (Continued) with no apparent purpose, but very easy to fix.

(I find myself using inline parentheticals to give pronunciation clues for acronyms or foreign names, but I'm not sure even that is kosher.)

As for unfilmables (descriptive action that we the audience can't see or hear), I think giving the actor something to act is okay even if not directly visible, but that's it. Saying that Paul is autistic I think is inbounds. Everything else in an action block should be something the audience can see and/or hear.

I'd also look for bits of dialog that can be implied by action or just the surrounding dialog. For example, the trauma of memories surrounding the wedding dress in Friends can be accomplished entirely with facial expressions.

There are a number of places where there's no space after a period, but really simple to fix.

Suggestion for Insignificance: Show the script on the laptop screen and how it describes what's about to happen, such as Jay (who's not looking at the screen) spilling a pad and pens out of his bag.

I'm curious if these dramas are going to interlink across episodes.