The Briefcase Incident by Logan McDonald - Short, Action - A simple robbery goes horribly wrong in every way. 8 pages - pdf, format 8)

Hey Logan, a few thoughts, just my opinion of course...

1) An M-16 seems a rather large weapon for a hold up, not easy to run with I'd guess either.
2) I know the guys are all a similar age, but that's about it, some description may be useful.
3) Given they warn the guard twice it seems unlikely he can get his gun out and shoot someone in the head first

Other than that, this is well written, nice and clear action and well paced.

The only thing that it lacks for me, is some form of twist in the narrative in the ending.

Anthony

Logan,

Nice try, this one. But I think it misses the mark. You had me at the opening, with the men coming out of the pawn shop. I liked that visual. But once the action began I kinda lost interest. It seemed a little busy with five robbers. None of those characters seemed very well defined, so I wasn't invested in their outcomes. Perhaps if you dropped the number down to three it would free up some space and you could give us something that might make us feel for your characters.

The action wasn't bad. I find with action scripts you kinda need to keep it short and sweet, and keep it tense all the way through. You need utilize mini slugs when they're running towards the end. Instead of --

They turn into...

EXT. ALLEY - NIGHT

use

They turn into an

ALLEY

and continue from there.

Also, there really weren't any stakes involved. You could have had one of the robbers out for revenge, or maybe they were stealing money to pay for his little brothers operation. Anything that would make us pull a little for these guys.

Steve

Thanks for the comments, everything helps!

Anthony:
Looking back the M-16 is a bit much. I was looking for a cool gun and without taking any extensive research chose the first one to come to mind and look at one picture. It’s something that will change with a new draft.

Steven:
Thanks for the information on the mini slugs. I’ve received similar notes in the past and will start applying them to my work from now on.

To both you guys:
A stake in the plot or twists in narrative will have to come down the line. I wanted to write this to create a continuous storyline and maybe one day shoots this as a one take film but attempting something like that will not keep an audience invested, you got to care about the characters. It’s something I’ll need to revise down the line.

Thanks again for the advice!!
Logan.