Til Death Do Us Part by Andrew Lightfoot - Short - An elderly man finds a VHS tape holding the memories of his life. 9 pages - pdf, format

Hi Andrew, a few thoughts, just my opinion of course

1) There's a few typo's that are a little distracting e.g.
'A old man ADRIAN MILTON' - should be 'An old man...'
'takes of his coat'- should be 'takes off his coat'
'fumbles in is pocket' - should be 'fumbles in his pocket'
These are all in the first ten lines, you need to have a good read through.
2) You don;t need CONTINUED at the top/bottom of your pages, think your software is doing this automatically, you should e able to turn it off.
3) I found it difficult to follow in places due to the cutting between scenes and timelines, so you might want to look at how these are constructed/paced.

I thought there was a tone that built well in the script and I think there's promise here, just needs some polish.

Anthony

Andrew, things get by all of us but...

It's always a good idea to proofread more than once and get someone else to proofread as a backup before you post something. Case in point:

He says a quick silent prayer before stuffing a napkin in
the front of his shit.

And then:

he behinds walking towards the main hall.
by until hit hits "1:04"
laying on the on the couch.
arms. she gazes
suddenly the T.V turns to
The clearing of a throat is hear.
slowly closerto
the lights in he living room
It’s slowly fades to black.
on. the T.V shows nothing
Her coat she hangs
The END

I don't want to sound like a hard-arse but there's no real excuse for this number of typos/mistakes and it makes your actual story very hard to get into.

Is this perhaps an earlier draft?

All thoughts are welcome, thanks for the read

As soon as I finished it, converted it to PDF, and submitted it, stupid thing to do I know, but it's my first crack at writing a script in 4 years, kind of jumped the gun with this.

Yes, the software I use does do the continued automatically, I use celtx, I'm going to take a look through the options and see if I can shut it off.

I'll take a good look at the timeline too, I wanted to have it so that Adrian's (who is in the afterlife sort of thing) time is the same time as Mirra's. I checked it out now and I certainly should've added the time in on more scenes like Steven's first scene. I just don't know the best way to properly portray this.

Thanks for read and tips Anthony,

LC

Thanks for taking the time for this, clearly wasn't an easy read.

Proofreading is certainly something I need to start doing again.

This, unfortunately, is the first and only draft, as soon as it was done it was submitted.

No problem Andrew

And to turn off Contiueds in Celtx, assuming you are using the Desktop software, then do the following...

1) Load one of your scripts up.
2) Go into the Typset/PDF tab.
3) Next to Save PDF, you should see Format Options - click on this
4) You should get a popup box with two tabs, 2nd one is Mores and Continueds - you can amend your setting in here.

Careful if you are saving things in CeltX with the desktop, it's not saving properly to their Cloud anymore, I lost days worth of writing last week... support wont help because the Desktop version isn't support anymore... if you are using the online version I think you should be ok.

Anthony

Awesome! thanks, now that continued issue is solved.

I've seen the advertisement for the cloud, never used it though, I just save files as PDF right on the desktop.

Quoted from AnthonyCawood Careful if you are saving things in CeltX with the desktop, it's not saving properly to their Cloud anymore, I lost days worth of writing last week... support wont help because the Desktop version isn't support anymore... if you are using the online version I think you should be ok.

That has never worked for me. I assumed it was because I'm using a linux OS.

Could have been for you Dustin, but was working fine for me and meant I could use laptop, iPad, iPhone and always have the right version to work on... then last week I lost about 12 pages of work which according to CeltX support is a new but known issue and there's no fix because they don't support the desktop now. So 12 pages gone...

To say I was a tad miffed is an understatement ;-(

Anyway finally shifted to FD, that has Dropbox save/sync so hopefuly more stable!

@Anthony- I moved to FD as well.  Celtx just didn't work for me on the go.

I am still waiting on info on where to click to read scripts on the forums.  Still can't see it argh

@ Edith - you're in the forums, you managed to post here!

Go to the top of this page, click on the second instance of the script title and it will launch a PDF version for you to read.

You can navigate round by using the links at the top too, they are just black text on grey so not so obviously links, but you'll soon get used to it...

These are the ones I mean, near the top of the page
SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board  ›  Unproduced Screenplay Discussion  ›  Short  ›  Til Death Do Us Part

Andrew,

Good comments live forever.  Bad ones die an ignominious death.

Frankly, I found this one a bit confusing. We have old Adrian going to bed. Was the photo of Mirrra?  If so, why isn't he at the hospital?  She's dying, he finds the tape of him and mirrra?  Then her spirit arrives and they're both young. Was Adrian already dead?  As you can see I'm confused.

Others have pointed out problems and mistakes, so I won't.  This one needs some cleanup.  Dialogue and description.  

Best
Richard

Richard

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read it.

Yes Adrian is dead already dead, I have done a poor job of showing this, originally I wanted to have a scene where we see Adrian's passing, but decided to try a different route. I wanted the reader to suspect he was still alive but find out at the end that he was actually dead.

I'm doing a big re-write of this, mostly to fix poor grammar and action. Also to change the dialogue in places. I will try and find a better way to show Adrian's story too.

Hi Andrew.
I thought this was a wonderful little story, but it needs some smoothing out.
There were things I read that stopped me, and took me right out of the story like the time, and introducing characters later on who really don't do anything to move the story forward. You could have showed his wife in the hospital bed to begin with surrounded by family. Maybe she mumbles his name and family says she's thinking about daddy, transition to the man at his home...

Just my two cents.
I think it is a lovely little love story though, just needs tweaking along with checking for typos.
Cindy

Cindy

Yes, that sounds so much batter having his wife's scene first, I can completely remove the stupid times.

This was a redo of a short I posted here like 3-4 years ago that I just found today, titled Life Without, I sort of went the way you suggested, but didn't have the wife passing away, but obviously doesn't have the happy ending that this one does.

I'm going to try and merge this together the best possible way, I think this will solver all the issue you have.

Thank you for the comments