Total Eclipse Episode One by liam  - Short, Drama, Horror, School - About that a love that fails before it even has started, 3 years later He is after revenge and the only way he is going to do that is to hurt the thing she loves the most.  23 pages - pdf, format 8)

Hi Liam

I have a question for you. Can you please fix or reword your logline.
After that I will give this one a read.

Hi Liam

I'll agree with Vaproductions that your logline is longwinded and needs to be reworded.

I opened your script and got to the end of page 1

No FADE IN

There are some strange times appearing down the right :(

Your grammar is pretty bad...

In the pub theirs loads of western people there. Stanley
walks to the bar banging his hand on the wood. He takes
his hat off...

Spelling mistakes"theirs" should be "there are" even so, it should be totally rewritten. I have no idea what "banging his hand on the wood" means, there are no other references to the "wood"

lose the CUT TO and CUT BACK

A guy staring closely at him... it's full of passive writing... A guy stares at him closely.

three years later

Should read

SUPER: Three years later

I'm sorry Liam, this is only the first page and there are quite a few more mistakes on it, but I'm gonna stop.

Read scripts, participate and you will learn a lot.

Mark

Liam,

I haven't seen you on the boards yet, so I'll be brief.

I agree with the others that this needs a lot of work.

What are the numbers after the slugs for? Looks like the time or something...

Your action lines are clunky, for the most part. Everything's broken up into small, repetitive sentences. (Like when you started two sentences in a row with "Stanley".)

While you're right to capitalize your character intros and give us the age, you don't have to tell us about his hair or clothes unless they serve the plot in some way.

Don't write CUT TO in the middle of your scene. Just tell us a man's staring at him... in our minds, we'll see a cut. (Besides, you need to keep your verbs active. "A man is staring" should be "A man stares".)

It's best to stay away from parentheticals when possible. "Deep voice" doesn't really serve the plot.

You skipped the slug for INT. TRUCK. Every time you change locations, you need a new slugline.

"Three years later" is unfilmable. How will we know this time has passed if we're watching this on film? Make sure you're only writing stuff that the audience will actually see on screen, otherwise your story won't make sense on film.

Sorry, Liam, but I'm not going to read further. You've got a lot of spelling and grammar errors that you should've caught in a single read through. Proofreading is important because it shows us that you care about your work. And when you've got simple errors like this... well, it's not good, man. If you don't care about your script, why should we?

Sorry if this comes across as harsh, as that's not my intention. Good luck, and keep writing.

Will

Quoted from crookedowl What are the numbers after the slugs for? Looks like the time or something...

I can answer only this.  He probably did this in Adobe Story online.  It has a feature that will calculate Running Time.  You can set it per scene or cumulative time.

Liam,

It's hard to imagine that this script is for real. It's fine for new users to send in screenplays with the wrong format. That's understandable. I can even understand wording being weird and incorrect because someone doesn't use English as their first language. But how in the world can you not put periods, commas, and other marks in your script? It's hard to believe you didn't notice this. I mean, even new users are able to at least put periods and commas where they are supposed to go. This doesn't occur with all of your sentences, but I noticed it a bunch of times throughout the script.

I honestly don't know what else to say about this script. There's so many things wrong with it. Actually, it seems like the formatting is correct, for the most part. Everything else, though, is terrible. Words are used in past tense, sentences are phrased oddly, etc... Liam, please listen to what the other users above have said and pay VERY close attention to your sentences. Perhaps reading them out loud will help you understand what works and what doesn't work. That's what was recommended to me when I first started writing scripts, although I never had the problems you do.

Sorry if I sound harsh. No one here wants to put you down and make you feel bad. I think most people here, including myself, are just surprised by this script. I don't believe I've ever seen anything like it. I do think it can be better though.