The Kind by Michael Leroy Blakeney - Sci Fi, Fantasy - Jessica Simone plugs her cellphone into a cigarette lighter in her car and changes the world, or does she? 176 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

This is at least 66 pages too long, and loads of camera shots. Numerous long parenthetical instructions. And what's with all the underlining?

Ok, I decided to read the first few pages of this.  Let's start at the top with the title page.

- A title page should not be numbered.  It's also not page 1 of a script.  Page 1 is the page after the title page.  Page 1 should also not be numbered.  Numbering starts on page 2.

-You don't need to have the title of the movie at the top of every page, especially on the title page itself, since the title of the movie is in big letters in the center of that same page.

-You don't need to have copyright notices on the title page twice.  You also don't need to write out "copyright (c)".  Typing out "(c)" is what people do when they're using a font that doesn't have the © symbol in it.  However, you don't need the symbol anyways, since you already have the word "copyright" written out.  The © symbol is just an abbreviation for "copyright".

-You should probably get rid of the whole "This is a work of fiction..." disclaimer, especially since there's at least one typo in it.

-There's zero reason why you should have (MORE) at the bottom of your title page and then have your email address on the next page.  Get rid of some of the white space on the title page so that your email address is pulled up onto the bottom of the title page where it's supposed to be.

Now lets move on to page one, (or what should be considered page one)...

-You don't need a bunch of white space at the top of the page.  Slide everything up so that you use the whole page.

-There's no reason why you should be using italics or underlined text for any of the stuff you have written there.

-The first two paragraphs on page 1 should probably just be cut entirely.  It's all just unfilmable narrative or quasi-camera shot instructions.  If you intended for some of that stuff on page 1 to be text that appears on screen, use a "SUPER:".  For example, if you want the movie to open with a view of a city, as an establishing shot, you could cut everything down to something like this...

          EXT. THE CITY - DAY

          A sprawling city stretches across an uneven landscape.  The urban sprawl reaches as far as the eye can see.

          SUPER: This story could have taken place ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, but it happened HERE.

-It looks sloppy to have a slugline at the bottom of a page followed immediately by (MORE).  Just put another line of white space above the slugline so it gets pushed down to the top of the next page.


On to the next page...

-Get rid of every line describing a camera shot.  It's the director's job to decide which camera shot best captures a scene.  All you should be doing is telling a story by describing what the setting of a scene looks like, and what the characters do and say in that scene.  Don't describe what anyone is feeling, and don't describe how the audience should be feeling.  Always remember the rule, "Show, don't tell."

-Get rid of all the sexual innuendo and blatant sexualization of the main character.  You've described this script as "science fiction/fantasy" not "erotica".  Yes, a sci-fi story can still have titillating scenes in it, but you need to have your characters established before you dive into that.  You spend more time in the first few pages describing Jessica Simone as if she's a sex object than you do as a actual character.  It's going to be an extremely hard sell to get readers to go more than a few pages into your script when you start off like that.

-A lot of your descriptions are overwritten.  Everything could be tightened up a ton.

-Some things don't make any sense.  In one long, run-on sentence you say that the lump on the bed next to Jessica is sleeping, but by the end of the sentence, there's "hog-calls" filling the room?  Where are the hog-calls coming from?  Is the "sleeping lump" making them?  Is Jessica making them?  Are they just supposed to be sound effects that you want happening in the scene?  What is going on?

-Your character headings for dialog sections don't need to be colored gray.  They can stay black, and they don't need to be bold.

-Only put parentheticals in for situations where how or who a line should be spoken to is unclear, or in situations where the character is performing an action as part of reading the line.  And try to keep them as short and to the point as possible.


As HyperMatt said above, your script is also WAY too long.  That's probably because you've wasted a lot of space with camera shots and unfilmable narrative description.  Cut all the camera stuff out, tighten up all of the action sections, get rid of most of the parentheticals, and fix all your formatting to be correct, and you should be able to get it down to under 120 pages.  If you do all that, you'll have a better shot at someone reading it all.

I read the first fourteen pages.  This is very... enthusiastic .  You go into an absurd amount of detail that doesn't really translate off the page but it does drum up the page count in a way that might be a bit off-putting.  Character's inner most thoughts, motivation, background, commentary.  None of this is really necessary unless it's shown/explored within the actual story.  It might come off better if you were writing it as a novel.

But congrats on finishing your screenplay.  A lot of writing involves reading and rewriting.  You should read some screenplays and familiarize yourself with proper formatting and technique.  Good luck :)