The Day The Earth Stood Still by Aaron Gracheck - Sci Fi - In the town of "Horse Town", strange events occur. Henry Plane, who has an encounter with Klaato, has a family history of a secret letter. The CIA discovering what the letter is about may be the only way to get Klaato, Gort, and the other aliens off the planet. But, they are here to warn us and help with something in the distant future: Armageddon.   89 pages - doc, format 8)

thanks man for posting! anyone who has anything to say about it please comment

Hey Aaron. I read a few pages of this and instantly found a few small things wrong.

At this stage in your writing, I strongly suggest you take out all, or most of the "we see", "we hear" and anything else that has "we" in the front basically.

Also, show don't tell. "The boss walks over to the screen, obviously an intruder of some kind." How do we know he is an intruder? You haven't shown us, you have told us.

What have you used to write this? It looks like word. It's very messy. If you can use Final Draft or a free program, it would be MUCH better.

Hope I have helped a bit...

thanks for the advice Tommy

Hey Aaron, we’ve talked via E-mail a few times, so I’m gonna just get down to it.  May feel like a trip to the Dentist when you were a kid, but you know it’s all meant to help.  I don’t want to sound like an ass at any time, and if I do, I apologize up front.

You misspelled “written” on your title page.  You literally can’t have mistakes like that…horrible way to start someone’s read.  I know you don’t have any software currently, but you’ve got to be using something with some kind of “spell check”.  OK, sorry, but that’s just terrible.

OK…sorry.  Here we go again.  I’m back on track.  Aaron, you need to visit a few “screenwriting websites” and read what’s written about writing a script.  At the same time, you need to read some “pro” scripts, as well as some better ones in here.  Even without screenwriting software, you can easily put together a “script” that reads as it should, and makes sense in what it’s trying to do.

Formatting isn’t that difficult to figure out, and again, you need to study up on it quite a bit.  Once you do, you’ll immediately understand what’s wrong here and why.

When you use a scene heading like “INT. MILITARY BASE – EVENING”, that immediate scene has to take place inside said Military Base.  You start it off with men going outside…and then they have tanks.  That’s so far from an interior shot.

You have a scene titled “EXT-Night-country-Later”, what is that supposed to mean?  2 sentences later, you state that “we’re inside the car”.  It’s these kinds of examples that lead me to say again, you need to “step back” and  think about what you’re doing…read as many different  views about writing screenplays as you can…read tons of pro scripts…read well reviewed scripts in SS…try to see the flow of things and why things move as they do..

I hope this makes some sense and helps.  You know, the cool thing is that you’ve written some complete scripts, and you seem to enjoy this stuff.  Bone up and learn some techniques and formatting rules.  As I recommended in my E-Mail, Movie Magic Screenwriter is awesome.  Pay whatever you have to, cause it will totally get you going, and you’ll probably be psyched with the results and motivated as shit to get down to writing.

Hope this helps, bud.

thanks for all the help guys, means a lot.