Lake Insanity by Chad Fleagle (shadeborn) - Horror - Many stories are told about Craven Wood Hollow's only lake. A group of young adults are about to discover the truth. Even wives tales have horrible truths hidden behind them. Even more so at Lake Insanity.  80 paegs - fdr, format 8)

Lake Insanity by Chad Fleagle (shadeborn) - Horror - Many stories are told about Craven Wood Hollow's only lake. A group of young adults are about to discover the truth. Even wives tales have horrible truths hidden behind them. Even more so at Lake Insanity.  80 pages - pdf, format 8)

Trudging through this yawner as we speak... It's one of those scripts you read a million times and do so because you feel your input can help the writer out. I have a ton of things to tell you on where you went wrong with the script, and surprising as it was, most of the things have nothing to do with format; as you have a pretty solid grip on proper format.

No, your problem rest with your dialogue, clichéd paper thin characters and story execution. The whole thing seemed like one familiar scene after another. Your characters all blend and mesh together with any and every character we've seen on screen in the genre before.

Your opener is more of an open to a short story than anything. If you're gonna open a feature length film, open it with a bang or a hook. We see a cookie cutter opener here with "Party, I'm in"  It's old... We've seen it before. The characters, the execution... The whole 9 yards.

Moving down the page...  before going any further I wanted to say you need to upload into PDF, man. Not everyone has FD software to read your coveted body of work, and not everyone feels they need to. Don't tell me FD doesn't have the option cos it does. Print to PDF... Even in 8.

When a character has more than one speaking cue... As in, he says something... Action occures.... Then says something again. Write it like this --

------------------------------------------
Jeffrey
your dialogue sucks goat nips, man.

He reaches for the delete button on the keyboard.

Jeffrey (cont;)
Let me help ya with it.

---------------------------------------------

Another quip... If you would add another L to the end of CYBIL, it'd get rid of those tacky red lines underneath the name. CYBILL... Not CYBIL.

In the end it's a slew of tired and untrue Goth smacks.

Page 15, and by then something has to have happened in a movie like this and nothing did. Lacey had her dagger out... WOW! I'm set for the next 30 pages now.  It just goes nowhere,  man.  Look back on your 1st 30 pages and ask where does this go? You exploited and exhausted me with your character set up... Boring characters at that. If they were new and cutting edge and not so bland I wouldn't have minded, but it just shows your infancy when you write page upon page of character set ups with no resolve or direction.

Some will argue with me, I'm sure... But in the end, this goes absolutely nowhere much too late in the game. It just goes on and on and on... Cut out 15 pages of the 1st 30 and rework them into a story that is of interest. We don't need to have you profile every character so early on.

A movie unfolds over time. Characters develop over time. Character traits develop over the span of the movie they are in... Write like they do. Don't give us every tiny detail about a character when we 1st meet them. It's not necessary. I read so many screenplays where people blast us in the face with every character traite the person has when they're 1st introduced and then never go back to those traites later on in the script.  It's almost like we're suppose to remember them as if they are character bios and not real character descriptions.

For instance...  We don't need to know the hair color of everyone. We don't need to know the shape of their noses and eyes. We're pretty sure these things won't change in the span of the movie.  You tried to force so much into your 1st 10 pages without it going anywhere...

Please cut out 15 pages, rewrite it and move the story faster. All I have left to say.