Surge Protectors by Jack Ross - Short, Sci Fi, Fantasy - When the lights start to go out, the electric army is forced to fight off the invading storm surge.  5 pages - pdf, format 8)

Jack,

Page 1, A comma is not needed after heavens. I think you meant lightning. You can wrap the EXT. scene into one sentence.

...holding a baby, who sucks casually on a bottle. When you use "causally" in this context, it deverts from the visual aspect of the script. A can't picture a baby sucking a bottle casually.

The TV plays the weather channel. It kills the tone your trying to set here. Maybe a newcast of the fiasco that's going on in the city? Or something else I'll touch on in a sec.

Your slug INT. ELECTRICAL WIRE - CITY GATES - NIGHT is throwing me off. I completely lost my bearing.

SOLDIERS dressed like bright yellow Spartans shoot electric laser beams - LOL! That's something you don't see everyday.

Page 2,
SOLDIER
(In awe)
My god... There’s millions of
them...

LOL! I don't know why I am liking this story so much.

Page 3, Ten or so, massive cube shaped airships fly overhead. Ten or so, sounds generic.

Alright, this has TV COMMERICAL written all over it. Maybe Radio Shack or an electric company? It's overwritten, but its creative as hell. I would put this in my guilty pleasure catagory. Good luck.

Johnny

This was a cute story and an enjoyable read.  Some of the descriptions could be tightened up.  You should make an effort to get rid of the orphans.  There were quite a bit of them.

Hope this helps.


Phil

Jack, let me make sure I have this right: in the world you've created here, an imaginary army fights against a force powered by a thunderstorm just so I can continue to watch re-runs of Big Bang Theory on TV, have all my lights on, have heat or air conditioner running while microwaving some popcorn?

That...is...cool!

I will never again complain about having to go from room to room and re-set all the clocks. From now on I'll do and say: "I guess we lost some good men today, but we'll get 'em next time, boys."

We need a sequel based on the 34 minutes of darkness that happened during Super Bowl XLVII. Sequels should be bigger and better...and you don't get much bigger than that.

Very interesting read. Had a "Toy Story" feel to it. I'm not sure if the end was supposed to be much of a reveal. It was pretty clear from the beginning what was going to happen, but that could have certainly been your intention with the kind of story this is. Still a creative script and we need plenty more of that. Good work.

- Kurt

Hey Jack,

I decided to crack this open because I’ve read the wonderful “Never Let Go” by Khamanna that was top of the pile so I went to the second one on the list.

I’ve never seen you around the boards so I’ll be brief – more than happy to elaborate if you wish?

It’s a nice idea and quite enjoyable if you can look past a lot of issues in the writing. I had this “Starship Troopers” image going through my head during the war scenes.

I would also add that if you tighten this and get rid of those “continued” on the top and bottom of pages then you cut this down to three pages.

Good luck and keep writing. :)

Steve

Hi Jack,

I thought this was a more or less decent effort. Your concept hits that sweet spot of simple and clever and the writing paints a strong visual picture that gets surprisingly epic at times. I also like the bookends of a quaint intimate environment sandwiching something much more vast and chaotic. It compliments your concept nicely and creates some interesting juxtaposition.

I think you can definitely tighten up your writing. There's some phrases here that are very appropriately economical and serve their purpose well but many of them can be found next to phrases that are not only excessively wordy but also redundant.

Your opening paragraph, for example. "A massive thunderstorm rages all around. Wind howls through the trees, rain pours from the heavens, and thunder and lighting fill the dark sky. A lone house stands in the middle of a large piece of property."

Your second sentence communicates literally everything that your first one did and thus can be completely done away. Overly verbose writing is always problematic but when the writing's both parts concise and verbose, it's even worse. You could easily do away with entire sentences without having to make any changes to others.

You also need to watch out for your orphans, that is, lines containing only a single word. They take up mad space that builds up the longer your script is. Personally, I'd count lines like "at bay" as orphans as well as they're so short and can be excised so easily. Doing away with orphans is one of the simplest and quickest methods to tightening up your writing. I'd get on it ASAP.

My only other complaint would be the somewhat detached nature of the writing in relation to what's going on in the story. Reading your script, I'm seeing a lot of epic wide shots packed with thousands of individual subjects, as you've so illustrated. There's a place for all this, of course, but I don't think it's very balanced at this point. You've got a captain and a soldier for us to hone in on but I never felt like I was really at their sides. They just sort of got lost in the ether, so to speak.

As a result, a lot of the dialogue feels like filler just to break up all the action and as I didn't feel like I was at the sides of your characters, it occasionally comes off as disembodied.

I do like the epic feel but we need more individual character interaction to put us in the thick of things. Otherwise, you lose that immersive feel, which is a paramount element to storytelling of any kind.

Regardless, I felt this was a brisk and entertaining work. Good job. I hope you'll find my comments useful.