The Battle of Boxhill :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

From the onset I can see that there's an interesting story here. And I feel the need to give you some accolades for trying something unique and different. I don't quite know how this'll work, but I can sort see as an animation feature or maybe claymation. A film with CGI birds....ehhhh. I don't know about that.

But I'm on page five, and the writing is keeping me isolated from the narrative. The dialogue is very awkward, very blunt. Every character describes what they're feeling in a direct way. I assume you're reaching for a large scale and bombastic tone. But let's look at the LOTR films for example. Even dialogue of that's stylized to be formally dramatized to fit the fantasy genre, has humanity and grit to it. It comes from sub-text. Lines like this:

Quoted Text

ALGAR
When will you grow up? Thereï¿½s not
enough food here to support all of
us. You must find your own home.

..are almost always "secondary dialogue," It's the one hidden behind the dialogue that's actually on page and never said out loud. Have your characters hint to what they're feeling. People like to express their opinions in indirect and sometimes clever ways. Dialogue like this makes your characters seem one-dimensional and acts as a wall to whatever deeper characterization they might have had. As the story goes on, I'll care about them less and less because I can't buy them as real characters, which makes it tough to trudge through. Hence bad dialogue like this is a domino effect. Even if they're birds, they have to come off as 'human' as say, Simba and Nala from the Lion King.

As for your story and action writing. It seemed fine until page five. Or to be more precise, I was able to tolerate it until page 5 because as I said, you have my curiosity on terms of this story. I mean the balance between action and dialogue, the action lines themselves and pacing, all seemed to flow nicely enough for a while. But I'm feeling some laziness in regards to the specifics. It's hard to pin this down, but I'm finding it hard to visualize some of your scenes. Algar slams Ryker into the grass after being in the SKY, and than than next slugline says FIELD. But they've been in that field for a few seconds, right when they got slammed onto the grass, so when it switches to FIELD, for a split second I have to think this is another location.

Quoted Text

There is a hunter's hide among the pine
trees inside the boundary and every few metres there are
signs saying NO TRESPASSING ON THE ESTATE.

I assume you want the camera to catch a shot of a hunter being obscured by foliage, and all you can see is his torso. But this doesn't paint a cohesive image in my head, except a somewhat obscured picture of a dislocated arse on the ground, and there's pine-trees everywhere. And a "boundary?" I had to break myself out the story and think about what this shot is describing. Even if I only had to consciously do it for a split second, and it was easy to get, it's still after the fact that I'm out of the story. And secondly, the "and" here is unnecessary and makes the sentence read awkwardly. Take it out and you'll notice how it flows much better.

How can a bird "hop under the fence." Fences tend to be stuck to the ground. There was no mention of ground being dug or a crack in the fence or anything that would permit that possibility. So once more, I'm having a hard time visualizing the scene. My immersion was hanging by a thin thread by before you introduced three characters in one scene, by the time you did, I was officially out.

I would recommend going back and fixing the issues at hand here. Because I am interested in seeing where this story is going. You've done an admirable job to that point, which you should pat yourself on the back for, because that in and of itself is in my opinion the hardest part of crafting a script. But there's too much muck on thr surface keeping me away.

Best of luck to you in the future...