Prey by Bill Houser (Ouraboros) - Short, Horror - A geeky teen boy has an unfortunate run in with a girl that's a bit more than he had ever expected. 17 pages - rtf, format 8)

Hi,

This was a good story, very predictable however, as soon as Sophie started telling the story i knew how it would end up. But you got to the end fine and told the story well.

There were a couple of things with the writing style i think needs changing, there were far to many camera directions. The idea of a spec script is to tell the story and not tell the director how to film it, this would put many people off and i suggest they need to be removed. They seemed to get out of control towards the climax of the story and at one point i was not sure what was happening with all the "dolly's" and the "pan's" going on.

Also, There is an awful lot of "We see's" after reading some posts on the use of "We See's" i spent an evening going through my own first script and replaced them all with something more descriptive. Pain in the ass but worth it in the end.

Also it is worth pointing out that your scene headings need to be in capitals, i.e. EXT. GARDEN - NIGHT.

The story itself however was well written, the scenes were described well making it easy to picture the surroundings. The dialogue seemed good - although would Sophie really talk like that if she was from the 1920's? I doubt it. Apart from that, good effort.

Thanks Murphy

Thanks for the comments...I was a little scared to see what other writers might point out, but feel a bit better now because you hit on the things I was already aware were issues.  This is for a short that I'm directing, and I think I wrote it too much for myself.  Directing the script while writing the script is a horrible thing, and I'm working hard to avoid it.  As far as the 'we see', just before writing this I read an article that actually suggested it, and of course since have read a hundred times that its a bad idea...just haven't changed this yet.  


Scene Headings were in caps until the RTF conversion...not sure what happened there?

Thanks again...having a chance like this to get others comments definitely helps you understand where you're at, and what you still need to work on.

If you wrote the script in FD, or another program, the caps is automatic. If you don't actually hit the shift button, or the caps lock button, the text will be lowercase once converted, or copied to word, etc.

So make sure you're actually writing with the caps lock button on.

Thanks for the tip.

Hey Bill;

Yeah...This was pretty good! Formatting issues aside, good story with some nice characterizations between Sophie and The Preacher...Not as much depth to Tyler and Kyle, who are relatively generic...Maybe give Kyle a mortal fear of cemetaries (or a compulsive interest)...Need a little more other than just being bait.

Needs to be tightened up;
the beginning scene with the kegger took a long time to get rolling...The main point was for the boys to meet with Sophie...The banter with the other headbangers didn't really flow with the plot, unless they were drawing some comparisons to Sophie and the girl in the legend...

Want to show, not tell...Instead of Sophie and Tyler chatting about themselves, It's better to just to show it, which you do nicely at the cemetary. Hot girl wants me to go to cemetary? Ok. I'll be there....

Like to see less of the party and chit chat and more of the boys running away from the Preacher, Heck, turn him loose on the sin and depravity of the whole keg party...He's a pretty cool villain, along with Sophie but he doesn't really get a whole lot action in the short...

Suggest looking at some other shorts here to get a better idea of industry formatting, however, that doesn't detract that this was a story with some solid potential...

Joe

Thanks Joe.

This is still a draft, and I've already decided that the party scene needs to be changed.  Especially, Sophie's aggressiveness which I believe makes the end a little too obvious.

Where you been anyway?

Hey Bill,

It wasn't that bad considering it was a predictable teenage horror.  (I'm usually put off by that same old genre.)  Although I think I'd like the story told around a campfire in the woods a lot more than seen on a screen.

And yes, everybody above is right, the camera directions and POV's and 'we see' and CAMERA DOLLIES have to go.  I don't know what article that was, maybe it was for directors writing a shooting script for his director of photography, but it should never apply to a spec script.  The purpose of writing a story should be to get the story across.  You don't read 'we see' in any of Stephen King's novels, do you?

It's not important who's POV we're seeing through in your story, what's important is the action taking place.  And Murphy's right, all the directions just get in the way and confuse the story and, ultimately, take away from what the reader's supposed to feel.

But, like I had said, reading past those things, this is a pretty descent, no matter how predictable, story that I wouldn't mind taking a look at again after a clean-up.

- Mark