TO BE CONTINUED...

1.
Camera direction: this is the top tell for novice screenwriters.  I'm not just a writer, it proclaims.  I'm a director too.  An auteur.  Maybe you are, dear Screenwriter, maybe not.  You really should master one filmmaking discipline before taking on another.  Write first, direct later.  Let's hoover the noob stink off these pages.
This is the formatting technique pros use for framing shots without saying you're framing a shot.  We reduced 37 words down to 22.  The sentence about rubbing alcohol was cute, but doesn't gel with this close-up.  'Sterile' gets the job done.  Describing smells on the page instead of ascribing them to things in the scene might help the production designer dial in the look and feel, but there are ways to imply smells through action and dialogue.

And is the obsession with color important here?  Straw-colored vials.  Black benchtop.  White lab.  Do these colors give the scene more meaning?  I don't know.  If they don't, save your words.  It's immaterial here because it's a one-line sentence.  We're not sacrificing whitespace.  We can verbally dance like there's no overflow.

Words on the page must do more than describe, more than make you see: they have to make you feel something.  Do we want the reader to feel the coldness of the lab?

Now we're feeling the chill.



2.
Sherry's V.O. -- yes, it's 'V.O.' and not 'V/O' -- feels too verbose.  Overwritten.  Trim time:
Or a much simpler:


3.
Sticking with our unobtrusive technique for directing without directing, we have our first moment of action:


4.
Some minor simplification to make it land quicker:


5.
You know the drill: lose the camera direction by putting the reader where we need to be.


6.

Statements like 'standing at the counter' are completely dispensable.  Don't clog the flow with minutia.  Let the obvious things go unsaid.


7.
Here's where I make my first sequencing edit to the scene flow.  Now that we're using mini sluglines to perform our camera directions, we have the following suggested shot flow:

1. CLOSE on the vials
2. The PIPETTE siphoning the contents of rightmost vial
3. The waiting PETRI DISH
4. SHERRY
5. The PETRI DISH and the PIPETTE releasing the collected serum

I think the SHERRY reveal can wait til after what is now Shot 5.  And no need to foreshadow the petri dish.  Let's keep the serum collection/release continuous:

1. CLOSE on the vials
2. The PIPETTE siphoning the content of rightmost vial
3. The PETRI DISH and the PIPETTE releasing the collected serum
4. SHERRY

That way we stay in close-ups until we go wide to reveal Sherry at the bench.


8.
Awkward formatting fumble here with SHERRY's name slugging.  Seems there was an action line deleted or something?  I'm team "Keep your formatting simple and uncluttered if it's not a shooting script." I like to see no CONT'Ds except for page breaks or where confusion might creep in.  It's overused here and visually distracting.


9.
Simplifying:

There's a case to be made that Sherry, a scientist, would monologue with technical words like 'phobia.'  I have no strong objection to restoring it in place of 'fear.'  But the phrase 'facing your fear' sends the message faster than 'encountering the object of a phobia.'


10.
In my revised scene flow, this is Sherry's introduction.  Before that we were CLOSE ON the vial serum and the pipette doing the extraction.  Now, let's finish that shot sequence.

See how we accomplish the same stage direction without intricate actor blocking on the page?  No more 'takes a few steps to the right...'  No more 'opens the door of a...'.

Putting everything together, here's the revised first page:

Anna C. Webster is an award-winner writer and narrative designer who popped up on my gamedev Bluesky feeds.  She offers a screenplay writing sample online.  I read a couple pages and knew immediately I had to feed it into the 10PTT shredder.

I don't know Anna.  She seems lovely and talented, with a deep passion for artistic expression across many mediums.  Clearly, she's doing a lot of things right in her career.  What she's not doing well is presenting herself as a competent screenwriter.  This sample is two or three years old now.  That's alot of time to hone your craft.  Anna probably has a better sample screenplay waiting in her desk drawer.  In the meantime, let's dive into this one and figure out why it feels like a first draft.

Freddie's back.



The trailer doesn't wow me.  That's a missed opportunity for a great first impression.  It's Ashly Burch, so that puts some sizzle on the steak. It's weird how this trailer skips much of the meat in Freddie's logline on his IMDB page.  Freddie included two loglines, actually:



What bugs me most about both is the very tenuous link between the Spike and teleportation.  You have to wait until the end of the logline to understand the connection.

Combining the two, and ignoring the trailer, we learn:

• Everyone has adapted to the 10,000-mile alien tentacle (the Spike) that appeared in the sky years ago.
• Stuff it touches gets teleported vast distances.
• Our two-hander is (1) a struggling beekeeper, and (2) a grieving EMT.  When the Spike sends her bees and his car across the country, they take a forced roadtrip to get their stuff back.

That is one crazy long tentacle.  Ten thousand miles is about 16,000 km.  The Karman line is roughly 100 km above earth.  A tentacle 160 times that distance suggests to me an alien creature so big it blots out the sun for the whole planet.  But I digress...

Bullet point 1 is kind of there with the male lead's casual acceptance.  But we see this nowhere else. The general tone suggests pre-Spike and post-Spike are not hugely different.  A couple other quick examples of this indifference from others characters would help.

Bullet 2 is... nowhere to be found.  Not shown, not mentioned.  Keeping those gags under wraps, maybe. The consequence is us having no clue what danger the Spike poses.  We see vague hints of destruction, with none of those directly tied to the Spike.  There is no cause and effect.

The final bullet point is another mixed bag.  "Struggling beekeeper" We understand she's stressed out and uptight, but over what?  The Spike?  Her teleported bees? -- wait, we don't know the Spike teleports things because it's never shown or discussed, so how would we know it's that?

"Grieving EMT" -- again, how would we know? No part of this trailer shows him grieving.

"... sends her bees and his car across the country..." -- SCENE OMITTED.  We have NO idea why these two are forced to roadtrip together.  In the trailer it just happens.  In the logline it's clear: "to get my car/bees back."

The trailer makes the mistake of opening with them already together.  A later scene makes it clear they are "total strangers", but we've already connected them from that first shot, so it doesn't feel like their lives abrupty and forcefully intersect to kick off the roadtrip.

Freddie's first logline mentions a "dangerous roadtrip."  Again, we kinda see that in the trailer with the rifle-toting lady confronting our couple.  But there's nothing remarkable about her reaction. It's commonplace in our contempory world, never mind a future with a giant alien tentacle wandering across the sky.

Okay.  I'm done complaining about that trailer.  Back to the logline.  Let's blend Freddie's two loglines into a better one, and we'll use our three bullet points to do it.

The trailer gives nothing away about the nature of the alien tentacle aka the Spike.  Is it a permanent slowly roaming thing?  Does it appear and disappear?  In the trailer we see it pulse and slowly feather like lightning, so perhaps it randomly appears and disappears, leaving a trail of unavoidable destruction.  Anyway, we can ignore this.  No need to clutter the logline.  It's already a lot to take in.

"Everyone's use to the giant sky tentacle probing earth and teleporting things. When "the Spike" zaps a beekeeper's hives and an EMT's car across country, they go on a dangerous roadtrip to fetch their stuff."

Thirty-five crisp, easy to digest words.  First we set up the Spike and what it does.  Then we use it to set the story in motion.  We jettison "struggling" and "grieving" because we don't need that fine detail in this logline.  "The Spike" is the star, the secret sauce, the draw card.  That's what hooks 'em, then you put 'em under your spell by layering the emotional journey on top of the roadtrip.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20112746/

Logline

"After raising an unnervingly talented spider in secret, 12-year-old Charlotte must face the facts about her pet-and fight for her family's survival-when the once-charming creature rapidly transforms into a giant, flesh-eating monster."

Discussion

Woven through this LL (oh god, I went there) are the clues announcing/screaming which famous book will be this movie's touchstone.

I can't decide if piggybacking (dammit, no) on Charlotte's Web is incredibly on-the-nose or absolutely required to lift this LL a tenth of an inch above "forgettable."  I suppose we try it both ways.

Lots of fluff smothering this logline.  Let's begin by ripping off the padding, see what remains.

"A 12-year-old must protect her family from the talented spider she secretly raised when it becomes a giant flesh-eating monster."

Forgettable.  Is it better if we reinstate the Charlotte's Web stuff?

"12-year-old Charlotte must protect her family from the charming spider she secretly raised when it mutates into a giant flesh-eating monster."

The book callback is the only memorable thing in this LL.  No question, it has to stay.

38 words down to 24.  No point fluffing a threadbare logline.

Riff track

Can we inject something, anything to make a silk purse out of this sow's ear (SSSOMEBODY STAAAP ME!)?

"12-year-old Charlotte must save her city from the charming spider she secretly raised when it mutates into the world's most dangerously well-intentioned arachnid superhero."

Having shuttered the site for some years after linked images broke when Wordpress changed their hosting policies, I recently decided to reopen the site.  Reopen the window, that is, not the door.  Registration is off and all membership is wiped.  Going forward, this is a read-only affair on your end.

There's a lot of content in here I think is useful for novice screenwriters.  And it's fun to time-travel back to the days when writing was a big part of my life.

Should you wish to get in touch, shoot me an email at (remove the spaces): ten page torture test at gmail dot com

Super excited for this one, arriving in a couple months.  And that logline!  Really hits the high notes: place, time, protag and their problem, and what to expect:


The only thing it's short of is brevity.  Let's make it hit harder, faster.  How about:


58 words to 37 words -- more than a third reduction.

Or maybe:

RIP, John McAfee, you strange, flawed, larger-than-life, and possibly murderous human being.

Revisiting this, it can be better.

We don't need "In the near future" because it doesn't contribute anything significant to the through-line.  So:

Logline: When creatures from an alternate world attack Earth, a father hides his daughter to keep her from being conscripted into humanity's only defense: an all-female army.

Some damn good work in these thar posts. Nice job, sir! Still not sure why I don't get notified of everything you post. Going to remedy that once and for all, right now.