He Ain't Heavy by Zach Jansen - Short, Drama - Reunited after five years, two brothers struggle to come to grips with their tragic past. 9 pages - pdf, format

Hi Zach,

I think you have a good structure to your story and the characters are well developed. The story develops in a relatively smooth manner and everything is pretty understandable (mostly).

You have a quite a few formatting and grammatical errors; I would strongly suggest you try to iron these out as it will put people off reading it. For example, you don't have a title page, which seemed a bit odd to me. You also do a lot of telling not showing, which will be heavily criticised.

Sorry, but the story itself didn't really do anything for me. I didn't think there was particularly anything wrong with it, but in parallel, I found it bland and too sentimental for my taste. I didn't care enough about the characters and nothing surprised me about what happened.

Thornton

Zach,
have to agree with Thornton re your formatting (example, your voice overs are in lower case) and other errors.

I opened this but some people just won't, due to it being a word doc. Is just the way it goes mate, people like to read scripts in correct PDF format.

***Download Celtx scriptwriting software and then re-write it - then upload as a PDF file and readers will be more receptive.

Zach, I have to disagree with Thornton re the story however, I think you have the basis of a good story here. Yes, it's a little sentimental and a bit cliched, but I'm a sucker for sentimental - found it quite touching... if a little predictable. And, although some editing is needed, for the most part your dialogue is good too.

I quite liked the your drawing of the characters too. The story just needs a little tweaking and perhaps for something to come out of left field.

You'll be amazed how much more professional your script will read when you use something like Celtx. It's a free download - just google and download it.

I encourage you to keep working on this though and resubmit another draft. Read some other scripts esp. in the 'shorts' section here and wade through the 'Screenwriting Class' section of these boards, re correct format.

LC

So i will start to read some shorts here beginning with this one.

First as the LC said you need a screenwriting program. Download Celtx, many people here will suggest against is ( like a guy named Baltis) but i like it.

Second i like your story it was very emotional. I think you have a problem with unfilmables like: "He starts the car and drives away - forever". How i the viewer know that's forever? I will see just a guy drive away.

You have many of those.......

To sum up that was a very nice try but with not a very genius twist , i was expecting it...........