Zaltha by Christopher Peterson - Short, Sci Fi - A P.I. looks for missing people in a magic town. 13 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Chris: you may have uploaded the wrong version.

Title page is a mess, there is no opening scene heading, a blank page at the beginning, etc.

Thanks for your help, I sent a new version where I got rid of the extra page on the title page and fixed my opening scene heading, and tried to make the title page neater.

Hello

I have read the first 2 pages and have a few comments

This is personal preference I think, but there are too many beats - They take me out of the read and ruin my flow of reading.

Your actions lines and descriptions can be condensed
- Remove things that cannot be filmed E.g "An evil glint in his eye"
- Try not to repeat yourself E.g "There is a huge shadowy space station near Earth bustling
with activity", you have already told us there is a space station in the scene heading, you can move the fact that it is huge into the scene heading to free up space

You also need to be clear with the action - you state that Lewis almost trips over, then his next action is getting up - therefore he has tripped over

You are also missing scene headings/slug lines - The scene starts inside the cockpit of the fighter ship, the whole space battle scene, we stay in the cockpit (That may be how you intended it - if it is, how do we see the missiles hit the deterrent)
The scene also starts in space, then ends in a corn field with no new slug lines.

The above makes it hard for me to read and visualise

A lot of scripts I read here seem to overuse the 'beat' tool a lot.
would be interested to know why that is.

This story was enjoyable and had some cool ideas in it that I would like to see more fleshed out. I would really like to see how the story would continue. Also, I feel like your logline could be changed to fit more with your overall story.

Here are a few errors I noticed:
pg. 1 - (Lettering on the screen) should read SUPER: instead, followed by the words you want seen on screen.
pg. 1, pg. 4, pg. 5, pg. 6, pg. 7, pg. 8, pg. 9, pg. 10, pg. 13 - I may be wrong but I believe you should not use BEAT. in place of action lines. Instead perhaps write what is being shown throughout the beat.
pg. 2 - ‘carrying banks of money’, should be bags.
pg. 2 - when you write ‘He jerks up out of the chair’, and ‘He looks to Kathleen’, I think you should instead write the characters names to make it clear who is doing each action.
pg. 3 - you don’t need to write: ‘The movie screen changes to a view of Curly at a distance.’ Just write: ‘Curly stands at a distance’. Also, I believe there should be a new slug line for when you cut to Curly.
pg. 3 - I found the first scene where we are introduced to Aurora City to be confusing and hard to visualize, perhaps be more descriptive here.
pg. 4 - I think the fight should be more climactic between Dennis and Curly and Kim.
pg. 5 - The BEAT.s should be part of the dialogue in brackets like this: (beat)
pg. 8 - Dennis’ first block of dialogue is not formatted properly.
pg. 9 - ‘a blurry vision vision’, delete one vision.
pg. 13 - what is the source of power?