Captain Gage by George Estremera - Sci Fi - An intergalactic road picture in which a 24th-Century space commander struggles to get peace-talk ambassadors off of a brutal police-state planet. Developed in the Writer's Digest Screenwriting Course. 100 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Quoted from Don Captain Gage by George Estremera - Sci Fi - A 24th-Century space commander struggles to get peace-talk ambassadors off of a brutal police-state planet. Developed in the Writer's Digest Screenwriting Course. 100 pages - pdf, format Writer interested in feedback on this work

I'll have to submit this with a different title page to producers and agents, as my old number is still on the title page of this submission.

Okay

What's an intergalactic road picture?

Have you read the script? A spaceship-based movie. It's just that most people just call them space movies, or space operas.

Okay, I'll get around to reading the script.
I'm also very interested to hear what you thought of the course. Have you taken other on line courses? How does this one stack up to the others? Do you feel it was worth the money? Do you have other shorts or features.
I hope your experience was good. I recently was told by a 55 year old actor (who is just starting out) that Kevin Spacey's on line acting course is well worth the money.
Oh, one other thing. You only have six posts. Have you been lurking on SimplyScripts for a while?

I took the Writers Digest Course, and for my first draft, it was worth the money. Kevin Spacey's course sounds cool.

Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn't been on here in a few years. Before, I had an earlier draft of Gage here. I'm working on an action TV pilot spec script. I would still someday like to write a pilot script for a drama about Renaissance fair people. Never could pull it together though.

The action description makes this a tough read, man. The sentences are very terse and fragmented and everything’s blocked together into large 4-7 line paragraphs -- put these together and you’re asking for people to doze off.

The BRIDGE CREW sit at their respective posts, which are
lined with touch-control panels. The red alert sounds. The
bridge crew stares at a hologram of the panetoid. At the
command post sits CAPT. LORENA SANCHEZ, 47.

Jumping from the crew on their posts, to the red alert (does this mean there are red flashing lights? If so, making it more visual would help), to back to the crew who are now staring at a hologram makes things hard to visualize. I’d recommend toning down on describing every little action (canons’ recoils, calling out specific explosions, etc) and using the cleared space to better describe the general setting. I had a hard time picturing the planetoid, for example.


I was confused about the exchange between Gage and Bauers at the end of pg 2 (you forgot to introduce Bauers, btw). They have unusual first names so, at first, I thought they were spouting out some sort of code or something.

Right after that, I didn’t realize Gage was giving a speech to the rest of the crew until after the speech was over. Giving us some description of him turning to the crew, being nervous, and seeing them all waiting for him to say something motivating would make things a lot clearer and emotionally relevant.

On page 6, the situation with the other ship falling into the Earth’s orbit could be an interesting situation, but I think you undersold it a little. It went by a bit too quickly and thus didn’t have too much of an impact. I wouldn’t call out the other ship’s name in the action description, either (the Gossamer). Not unless it comes back into play later in the story.


Formatting notes:
Double check your character tabs -- VOs and OSs were sometimes misplaced. Give the Super on the bottom of pg 8 a line of its own and, some of the action description bled into dialogues, also on pg 8.


I didn’t understand “intergalactic road picture” either. That makes me imagine it’d be a space road movie, not a space opera.