The High Life by Anthony Lando - Comedy, Stoner Comedy Webseries - The ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives of 4 stoners 15 pages - pdf, format 8)

I'm now trying to get this made as an animation but it's expensivee :(

Gave this a read as it's Script of the Day. First up, a little confession. I hate stoner comedies. Hate them! They always seem to think that the mere appearance of a bong is comedy gold. Unfortunately, it's not! Well, not for me anyway. Think the only time I've ever laughed at a stoner was Brad Pitt's character in True romance and that was more because of his dialogue than anything else.

I Guess  to truly appreciate stoner comedies - you have to have been there, done that! And I never have.

Anyways, on with the script. First problem I had was that there were no character descriptions! How old are they. Late teens? Early twenties? Also, because you have not distinguished between the characters and made them individuals with there own quirks etc. Their dialogue all sounds the same.

Generally there is very little conflict. James has issues with Nick because Nick thinks all James does is smoke weed all day. But apart from playing his instrument briefly, all James did all day was smoke weed!

Unfortunately, none of the characters are very believable and the story suffers as a result. Taking Anthony as an example. He is a video games tester who gets to work from home and smoke weed all day. While this might be a teenager's wet dream! Who gets to do this in real life?

Sorry, if this sounds harsh? Just trying to point out what I feel is wrong with the story. Anyone who makes the effort to write deserves a pat on the back in my opinion. Writing's tough! Sorry, guys, this script's not for me. But good luck with it!

Rolo

thank you for the criticism.

I didnt add character discription because it was still up in the air as to whether i was going to do this myself or let someone else do it, so i left it open to interpretation for casting purposes.

Plus I was also tossing up whether to make it an animation or not and i hadn't drawn them yet.

It is a bit far out with the job cause, the whole story is supposed to be out there.

James complains about Nick complaining about him because thats what stoners do, they blame everything on others while not taking responsibilty for themselves or actions.

Could you possibly point out some problem dialogue for you, I'm newish to this, ill write another draft.

Kind Regards
Anthony Lando

Hey Anthony,

I intend on reading this in the near future. I'm looking for something to read to take my mind off all this study.

Just a quick thing I noticed before I opened this one up. That logline is going to need work, mate. It doesn't exactly let the reader know that they're about to have a roller-coster like experience. There's no setup in the logline. No challenge offered to your characters or anything like that. I could be wrong, but that's what the log-line promises, at least.

If you are going to produce this yourself, I wish you all the luck with it. Filming is a challenging thing to master. However, what you need to remember when posting to SS is that this is a spec script website. Just because you may be filming this yourself doesn't necessarily mean that you should ignore things like character descriptions. Things like that should always be remembered in spec scripts, IMO, whether you're filming it yourself or not.

Quoted from A2n2t James complains about Nick complaining about him because thats what stoners do, they blame everything on others while not taking responsibilty for themselves or actions

If this is literally your plot, then you really have a lot to work on. Won't say anything on that, though, as I haven't read the screenplay and it would be unfair on the two of you.

Looking forward to having a read.

Cheers,

Dan

Anthony,

I took a look at this for you.   I like the idea and I thought your writing ability was ok but I think a few things about the way you approached this didn't work.  

First off, from all my research on the subject web series episodes should be 2-5 minutes each (and 5 minutes is pushing it).  Watch yourself next time you look at videos on You Tube - do you watch the long ones now or do you put that off and watch the short ones.   Most people watch short videos - not 15 minute ones.   Do yourself a favour and break this up into shorter pieces.  

Second, Loose the voice over - do it through dialogue.   You have more than one character and they aren't mute so they can certainly do that.

Third, don't see any reason why this should be animated.  Very cheap to produce.  If you don't have a camera use your mobile or a web cam to get the footage together.  Make it a found footage sort of feel (without the footage needing to be found).

Fourth, this isn't nearly funny enough.  For a comedy you need to fill the page with laughs in order to get one person to laugh at least once per page.  That isn't happening.   There's maybe two or three laughs in the whole script.

And last, what does BIT mean?

Hope that helps,

Michael