The Sands of Time by Leon XU - Short, Sci Fi - A young man accidentally reveals his ability to reverse the timeline of certain objects to his friends, but he is reluctant to use it, for the only time he used it before was to repair an object given by a loved one, and broken by their separation. 9 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hey Leon

Took a quick read, a few thoughts

1) The formatting is not 'standard', not sure what software you are using but I would look at
- Font size, should all be the same (Courier 12pt)
- I'd personally not bold the character names like you have.
- I'd also not bold things like hourglass and other descriptions of objects... it used to be fairly common to see important objects and sounds in CAPS but it doesn't have to be.
- Time statements in your sluglines... first scene you describe as A FEW YEARS AGO, the next as PRESENT DAY, these are not times that an audience can see, these would be better as a SUPER so that they'd actually appear on screen, in terms of sluglines it should be INT/EXT. LOCATION - DAY/NIGHT (Evening, Dawn etc can be used but again it's more common for straight Night/Day)
- I'm not sure but I think the margins might be a little out too... most dedicated screenwriting software will do this for you automatically.
The result of all the above is that the script doesn't look quite right and it distracts from the read, the good news is that it is very easy to fix.
2) Personally not a big fan of 'We see', opening can be easily be , An hourglass sits on a bookshelf, sand running out.
3) You introduce Peter with no description at all, is he an adult, a child, old age? You don;t need to over do it but age and some sort of description is helpful.
4) Peter enters a building... this needs to be a new scene, INT. you need to show this in the script for the producer to be able to understand that it's a new location.
5) Same with Alan regarding an intro
6) Condolensces seems an odd word to use in relation to a broken phone, but maybe it's on purpose.
7) The dialogue seems a little stilted, and some odd word/phrase use.
Moving from stairs to inside the apartment(?) should be a new scene heading, same for moving into his room.

I started to get a bit lost about page 5 so stopped at that point.

Hope the above is useful and helps improve the next draft of the script.

Anthony

Page 4 'the' should be 'they'.

Page 4 'the news IS presented...'

'Peter seems to listen.' What do you mean by that? Either he does or he doesn't, right?

'This morning, another strange electromagnetic field was sighted in Brighton. The man responsible is suspected to be Mr.Roy Ronson, a simple office worker, with no previous incident of the sort.' I don't know what you mean by the last 7 words.

'Scary stuff', doesn't sound like the thing a news reporter would say.

Page 5 'them' not 'then'.

Pete's friends seem a little underwhelmed and unsurprised by his powers.

I thought the dialogue was a little bland, (other than 'condolences', which I found amusing) but most of your writing was clear. Your script wasn't too bad, but it needs a lot of work.