Both my previous shorts dealt with pretty deep, dark issues.  A Perfect Day dealt with suicide.  So I purposefully made Bliss more light-hearted with a lesser dark subject matter.  

Thanks though, appreciate your feedback, you make good points, and yea, I prefer this one to Need also.   Hope you stay tuned with the production!

Curt

I tend to write rather dark too Curt....

Can't wait to see the your film when it's done! Keep us posted!!

D

I only write dark because I have a mystical past and was raised by evil dwarfs who made me steal potatoes for them.

Haha, but really, I just write more serious issues and dark stuff because movies I enjoy are of the same theme.

And I am so excited to see this come to life.  Stoked for on set photos!  The cast is awesome, I've already become close to one of the actresses, she's real cool, and wants to stay in touch.

Kevin, the director of this, also wants to shoot ANOTHER short before he moves to California and he wants to team up with me again, which means another credit for me and another chance to see something of mines come to life!

This feeling is awesome.  I feel so good.  I have never been this content ever.  I sound like a 50 year old whose experienced life, don't I?  Wow I'm annoying.

Curt

Curtis

As with the other shorts I’ve read from you, the writing is technically very accomplished, the read breezed by.

However, like your other stuff I’ve read I felt the narrative needs some work.

“Riley, arms folded, walks up to Cameron’s door.”

- Walking with your arms folded is not really a done thing is it? Would look rather odd, funny though!

While I appreciate you again tackling tough, real life emotions, in this case grief over a lost sibling, I think the execution could be better. Again, you take a very simplistic, linear route in portraying the issue. Thankfully, I‘ve never lost someone as close to me as Danielle seems to her brother so in a way, I don’t truly understand what Cameron is going through but at least on the page here, his recovery happens so quickly at the behest of Riley that I had a hard time buying it.

I realise you are working with a limited number of pages but I wonder is Cameron’s arc that you want to chart too complex and gradual to be fitted into such a short piece? I mean Cam goes from understandably grief stricken, morose and isolated four months after the event to what you imply to be a full recovery based on some rather clichéd sentiments from Riley. And all in 10 pages too, very difficult, for me at least, to fully engage in a story of that nature yet told so briefly and straightforward.

Basically, I didn’t quite believe that Cameron would bounce back as readily as that, Riley should pursue a career in grief counselling if that’s the case, she’s got a gift for it!

But seriously, I do admire you taking on weighty themes and trying to develop a story and characters out of that, and I do appreciate the hopeful conclusion for a bright future and creation of new memories but that narrative device is as common as storytelling itself and we’ve seen this type of thing a million times before. This doesn’t bring anything new to the table and is drawn too cut and dried to pack and punch.

Well done on getting it produced.

Col.