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Rating my screenplay

M

mmkp1990

Rating a screenplay

Hello,

I think some of you know that I have been working on a screenplay for a while and been learning along the way thanks to people's advice on this site. I have been currently rewriting in order to try to improve it and I have done it part by part. I try to improve one part before going to the next so that I can implement what I have learned for the future parts. I have an old post a while ago where I want to post parts of my screenplay so then other novice writers can look at the transitions between my first draft to hopefully what is a tighter screenplay.

So I have a link to the first part of the screenplay "Fragments of a Broken Heart" which is 40 pages below. I like to ask people if they can rate the first part of the screenplay out of 10, 1 for poor and ten for best. Don't be afraid to post your rating, I need the truth in order to keep improving (but don't be surprised if i stand outside your front porch tomorrow lol). Read as much as you like and if anyone wants me to read their screenplay then I am more than happy to if they want an exchange of feedback.

The logline: A traditional animation feature, when a tsunami kills his parents, a teenage Japanese boy must deal with the loss and move on with his younger sister in his care.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B32svqt43-9nOUYyU2lIQ3pVN2M/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you
 
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Are there no takers? Like I said I can do a notes exchange if somebody wants me to read their script if they can read mine? Byw don't worry about the format issue, it is fine in the full screenplay. Just when I copied and paste it, it might be slightly off. Also I realise on the drive there's a blank page inbetween title page and first page, don't know why it has done that but don't worry about that.
 
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I got to the fourth or fifth page but there was nothing to grab my attention. I am at school right now so maybe I can read the rest of it later. It seemed a little boring, you've got to hook me in the first couple of pages.
 
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Zaco32 said:
I got to the fourth or fifth page but there was nothing to grab my attention. I am at school right now so maybe I can read the rest of it later. It seemed a little boring, you've got to hook me in the first couple of pages.
Click to expand...

I have made a change on the screenplay, hopefully it has a better beginning. I posted the whole screenplay so it saves me pasting it on another doc and sorting out the format but please read up to page 38 (up to the hospital ward and hopefully it is interesting enough to get there) as the rest need a lot of rewriting anyway.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B32svqt43-9nWUZnNjNrc0w0Qk0/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for your comment :)
 
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Stopped properly reading after the first page. Didn't give huge confidence when the first line of dialogue was a grammatical mess - get into a habit of actually reading out your dialogue, so you know if it makes sense or if pauses/commas are needed to break up the sentence.

'Tomorrow is an horrific day for some, with thunderstorms swiping over northern and eastern areas of Japan.'

Second major problem is that you're writing out onii-chan. If this is a Japanese speaking family, then we're already expecting their dialogue to be in Japanese, so you have to write it in English. So it'd be 'We are going to the beach today, big brother'. If the dialogue is meant to be performed in English as it is on the page, then don't mix in Japanese words into an English sentence structure. It'd confuse audiences and make readers confused if they don't know what the term meant. Scrolling down it also means your script is inconsistent, as you have onii-chan repeated many times, but have Haruto constantly shouting Mum instead of okaasan.
 
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Cool I will speak out my dialogue out loud. I will actually change the mum and dad to Japanese versions. I wanted to add a little japanese flavour into it. It's like I'm Indian and I call my parents mum and dad but my younger brother calls me Bhai (respectful term for big brother). That's why to me it's no weird.
 
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You need to make a decision now. If this film was made, would it be in Japanese or English? If it's in English then do not use Japanese honorifics in the script. It might not be weird to you, but to readers who have no background/interest in Japan then they will just be confused. You also could get problems later on with dialogue not making grammatical sense in Japanese, because of the language having different words for the same thing depending on tone and context. Keeping those words in basically makes it read like a bad anime fan fiction, even though it deals with serious issues.
 
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I will keep the honorifics which are only onii-chan and Akari-senpai, if it comes down to a bad decision on my part then I will live with it. My main priority is to sort my writing out first. If it was Japanese dubbed then they will change the words and make it sense, exactly the same as how english dub has to work to convert Japanese to English.
 
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I agree with IndiePaul.

Your on-the-nose dialogue (and stilted sentence structure in general) suggests that you're not a native English speaker. It's hard enough writing good dialogue in your native tongue, let alone trying to do it in a second language. Don't be disheartened. It's possible to learn and it just means you have to work twice as hard at it. People rarely say what they mean, especially with someone they don't know: they talk around things, or they say nothing at all. And with people they do know, there's an abbreviated short-hand they develop in their speech. If you need to get information to the audience, and your character wouldn't say it naturally, then you find some other way to get the information out, or you forget about it. Read the links IndiePaul provided and learn about subtext.
 
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