A Stain of Blood by Victor Daniel-Kalio - Short, Action - A housekeeping job gone south plunges Rami into a fight for her life. 8 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hey Yo writer,

I searched for a script to read and the logline pulled me in, fortunately. The script, the story, is very good imo. Very good.

I'll place a spoiler below because I know there are some action freaks here and this one got that attitude on the line in which you better run into without a thing.

SPOILER
What I loved was the humanism you put into the ending. This woman was truly the underdog in that fight and she really kept her character in the grand finale. I just loved her saying "please" once again before she had to take him from earth's surface. She had to. He brought that fight to her. With that in mind and how I felt about the whole thing, I'd say maybe, maybe, the title of the story would be focused better when you also include that tragic fate of her, because after all that havoc, the drama brings the depth and is the game. And, I mean that without losing the genre completely of course: The Fate of Blood something… just a little more in direction of the tragic momentum of the story. 'Stain' is too cold to characterize the full movie imo. It deserves more specificity, a more proper characterization. But that's upon you of course.
END OF SPOILER

Well, I hope you can take some praise ;-)

Very interesting.

Hi Victor

I enjoyed this, it had a real feel of humanity to it. The characters were distinct, the story was interesting and moved along at a nice pace.

You are missing your FADE IN and FADE OUT for some reason.

The read flowed pretty nicely until page 7 - there's a lot of black ink there. I know it's an action-heavy segment of the script, but a lot of those words can be cut down and the larger blocks can be broken down into smaller ones.

At the end you switch to what the protag is seeing and feeling "She feels the back of her collar get pulled" - Not sure why you do this, stick to what we see, the viewer/reader. We can't feel her collar get pulled, we can only see it.

"She sees another fist drive down her face, her vision getting blurrier". Again, why not tell it as we see it? We also can't see her vision getting blurry unless you intend for this to be a POV.
If that's the case I would suggest you format it as a POV. That way we know we are looking at this through her eyes, so you can do away with all the "she see's" and just tell us "he punches her in the face"

I feel a little unsatisfied with the ending. Like I have just eaten a starter but there's no main course. Who is this guy? who has he killed?

Anyway, top job. Good luck with it.

Matt

Hi,

This is a great short script. Right into the heart of it.

Been a few months, so don't know if you are still playing with this, but my thoughts:

- Is this his hotel room? Is it possible for Rami to find something before he bursts in that signals the coming conflict?
- Maybe I missed something in the read, but I didn't quite understand what he wanted Rami to do. Take the fall for what he did?
- Did you consider having her taken as a hostage? Now Rami is conflicted that she needs to get out alive, but because she is undocumented, could be deported by the (rescueing) police.

Fun to read. Thank you.
Jay