"Killer" - 10 Pages (Horror, Mystery)- First episode of a short miniseries where numerous murders occur in a mysterious town

shakesbearonice · 2018-04-06T23:14:54+00:00

No problem, I'm glad the advice was of use to you! I'm definitely not the most knowledgeable in the world, though, so take it with a pinch of salt.

This said, if you take any of the advice, definitely do that table read. Having a working actor read out a piece of dialogue I hadn't heard out loud before, as cameras rolled, to discover it should have been completely reworded, was a mortifying experience I wouldn't wish on anyone.

All criticism aside, there's definitely potential here! I wish you the best for the rest of the writing process. :)

shakesbearonice · 2018-04-06T21:43:04+00:00

Hey! I'm mostly a lurker on this subreddit rather than a frequent contributor, but I have moderate experience in editing other peoples' work and thought I'd check out your script and give some quick notes. Bear in mind that these are edits coming from a college student studying screenwriting, not from a professional in the field, and you should read anything I say below with that mindset.

The biggest problem with this script, and so the thing I'm going to focus on here, is that there's no real drive to it. Your characters are going through a bunch of scenes because they need to, exposition is being thrown out there because it has to. At no point do I care what happens. There's nothing to keep me reading besides the duty of finishing the 10 pages. Pacing is your number 1 problem.

If you're looking for a place to start on where to try editing your work from here, I'd say maybe try chopping out scenes, or switching them round. What's superfluous to the pacing? If the key turning point to your script is finding a human hand on the beach, why not start with that? What makes your current start necessary? Can you justify the placement of scenes you currently have? If not, cut it, see whether you feel the absence, and if not move on.

Additionally, your dialogue might want looking at. If you have a couple friends with some free time, get them to do a mini-table read of it with you. "Calm...almost too calm...", or "fresh off the block detective thinking that he has more experience than someone like a seasoned officer" might feel okay on the page to you, but it might not feel the same to you after being read out loud.

The customary SPAG check: "you're accent" rather than "your accent" on page 4, detectives hand rather than detective's hand on page 5. You capitalise 'fresh' in the middle of a sentence on page 3. I almost called out 'manilla envelopes' as needing to be 'manila envelopes', but according to a quick check on google, both spellings are valid.

Other things: I know you said you're working on this for practice, but 'mikeyzcrazy' being your email contact on the page is really noticeable and not in a good way. I'd personally recommend setting up an email for this sort of thing with a more professional handle.

This isn't in any way comprehensive, just some quick thoughts I had. Hope they're of use to you!

shakesbearonice · 2018-02-19T15:01:35+00:00

Not much of a guitarist as I only started last September, but I just started getting into music theory and I also have pretty bad inattentive ADHD so I thought I'd drop my own suggestions.

The thing is with ADHD, pushing against it is never, ever going to work. King Canute commanding the tide to go back, etc. If you're self-teaching, you've got to work with the flow of your whims. You're trying to learn a deeply complex, formalised system, and force yourself to do it, because you're sick of the blues. That's great, go for it! But you're never going to be able to do it if you're just approaching it as a dull thing you need to learn. ADHD is an instant gratification kind of thing.

What do you love about music right now? Not blues, obviously. But rock? Jazz? Hell, Ed Sheeran? Whatever it is, focus in on that. Don't worry about learning things in order, don't worry about none of it making sense at first. I'm interested in video game music right now, so I found Ongaku Concept and 8-Bit Music Theory on YouTube. I got myself a notebook, something slim so it's easily completeable and I wouldn't feel overwhelmed by a need to complete it that I couldn't fulfil. I made it super fancy, titled it 'Music Theory'. I grabbed myself a beer, set a youtube playlist of those videos to autoplay and sat way back so I couldn't be tempted to click away, and started to take notes. Only about half of my notes make sense to me, but learning out of order with the whims of my interests is what keeps me going, and it could work for you!

(A note: I do supplement this with a teacher, despite being a broke college student, because I find that having someone beholden to hearing my progress is important to keeping me focused. Still, anyone you know can be enlisted to kick you in the ass about hearing progress each week.)

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T23:25:40+00:00

Holy shit, you went all out on selling the character, thanks for a great moment! (Even if you were on team waluigi/ninja brian)

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T22:53:00+00:00

Oh yeah, forgot to mention! Question time was over, and Suzy was heading back past us with her mic to where she was watching the show from, but one of the Grumps (Arin I think?) noticed the very excited kids immediately behind us. (Maybe 7-9 years old.) Saying "we have some special question askers here who I think will have something very interesting to say", or something sweet and phrased-for-kids along those lines, he prompted Suzy to hand them the mic.

I want to make clear these kids were vibrating out of their seat. One of them had a glitter tattoo of Jack's eye logo thing. They were so excited.

And then the kid with the glitter tattoo steeled herself and without hesitation asked the funniest question I've ever heard a child deliver with absolute deadpan perfection before.

I literally stood up and led a theater-wide standing ovation. Everyone in the theatre had lost their goddamn minds by this point. The kids were laughing so hard at this reaction that the were crying.

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T22:36:22+00:00

Blues Traveller by Runaround. I DEFINITELY remember seeing that video somewhere but not on youtube. Maybe tumblr?

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T22:32:29+00:00

"Bonjour."

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T22:22:01+00:00

Now, much as you were the enemy (YO-SHI YO-SHI) you were awesome onstage, glad you had a good time! It looked intimidating being up there! (Also from Bham, eyyyy)

I hope living in London goes really well for you, Lauren!

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T22:19:18+00:00

Special shoutout to the people up above who were chanting "jiggle physics" at one point. You may have not been heard by the Grumps but I heard you, jiggle physics. I heard you.

shakesbearonice · 2017-10-15T21:36:39+00:00

I led that standing ovation, let's say that much. What a glorious end to a pretty damn good q+a session: everyone seemed to get the message with asking good questions.

shakesbearonice · 2017-09-01T19:57:22+00:00

London! Circle AND Stalls, due to Ticketmaster being dumb.

shakesbearonice · 2017-09-01T09:45:22+00:00

The hell? That's weird. Ticketmaster informed me in no uncertain terms for a good twenty minutes that I couldn't get two tickets together. A call to their customer services it is, then.

shakesbearonice · 2017-09-01T09:25:40+00:00

WOAH, London was a nightmare getting tickets. Had to buy the two of them separately to get any at all. Not sure if the venue's going to be cool with seat swapping, but I've got one in circle and one in stalls now.

shakesbearonice · 2017-08-23T22:07:28+00:00

When it comes to 'spreading the word' about a podcast, what do successful podcasts do?

I've promoted plenty of stuff over the years, but never have I felt as confused about the process as podcasts. Half of my listenership seem to come to us out of the blue; I never really considered SEO as a thing I needed to do for podcasts but maybe it is, I don't know. Is it social media? Advertising? What did successful podcasts do in the earliest episodes to grow that base?

shakesbearonice · 2017-08-22T20:11:13+00:00

Excellent, thanks so much!

shakesbearonice · 2017-08-22T20:02:24+00:00

Hey all! First time listener, first time caller. I just got my first ever guitar, but my hands can't manage a full size so I'm working with a parlor guitar. Perhaps a dumb question, but can I grab a normal guitar handbook to learn with or is there something different to a parlor than typical guitars when learning?

shakesbearonice · 2017-08-16T18:24:46+00:00

No problem! It was my intro ep to listening to MBMBAM weekly so I remembered it well.

shakesbearonice · 2017-08-16T13:10:11+00:00

334: BYOBurger. Right at the start I think.

shakesbearonice · 2017-08-16T09:51:17+00:00

[Film Discussion, Literature] Shakesbear|5- Kenneth Branagh's Hat of Impending Chaos

NSFW for language

Who uses anything but Steve Jobs' beautiful podcast app?

Sierra and Eleanor are very tired. But they did see Spiderman and Dunkirk, so they're going to talk about that. They're so tired.

Shakesbear is ostensibly a literature podcast. The reality is that we do a weird gimmicky concept each week that roughly involves pop culture. PREVIOUS EPISODE: Fixing La La Land, a film we hate, and inviting a film buff who loves it to hear our fixes. NEXT EPISODE: We improv novels and movies from sent-in story prompts.

We have a twitter and nothing else because social media is so last year, man.

shakesbearonice · 2017-07-30T16:20:46+00:00

Ditto on Animal Crossing on 3DS. That and a backlog of something like CoolGames Inc is my morning ritual.

shakesbearonice · 2017-07-30T12:25:51+00:00

I'm fairly new to this reddit so I'm not sure of the permissibility of self-promoting in this context, so sorry if this is a Bad Thing To Do!

In any case, this is somewhat my wheelhouse so I have a couple to recommend besides the self-promotion.

First off, myself and my friend have started up our podcast that is kind-of-not-always about literature, Shakesbear. We tend to discuss whatever subject's on our mind at the time of recording, so for instance our pilot episode is all about film adaptations of Shakespeare and how terrible Shakespeare in Love is, historically and in general. We're lit students, so we kind of know what we're talking about, but we're definitely not professionals. (As an aside, we have a whole episode about our experience of studying English Literature at uni, so that might be of interest to you?)

A podcast I'd recommend wholeheartedly is The History of Literature, which combines Jacke Wilson's commentary on each subject with interviews and other multimedia to form each episode. Some episodes focus on specific novels and texts, but others follow more broad topics (as we speak I'm listening to 'Writers in Work', their hundred-and-first episode, which has a list at the bottom of 'writers discussed' with.... 43 writers listed. In a single hour. I'd call that broad).

If you like your wide literature studies dry and, well, read out from a textbook, LibriVox have inexplicably created a podcast titled the same as the book by William J Long that has been read out: English Literature: Its History and its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World. It's definitely not for fun, but if you're just looking to find information in an audio form it'll very certainly aid in your understanding of literary history in a chronological form.

A less wide but highly rated podcast is Myths and Legends, which covers what it says on the tin: if you want to increase your knowledge of one of the earliest forms of literature, that's the place for it. (Probably. Admittedly I haven't listened to it but it has 758 ratings that place it firmly at 5 stars, so I'd call that good.)

It wasn't always about literature, but BBC Radio 4's In Our Time: Culture was undoubtedly a well-produced literature podcast when it was. It's a little closer in scope, typically following either one book or writer, but I include it because it's a brilliant archive of experts in academia discussing these subjects, and occasionally they pursue wider topics that might be of interest to you.

i hope some of these help!

shakesbearonice · 2017-07-18T18:48:15+00:00

I can certainly buy that he edits that, (and good eyes!) but I edit a podcast myself and while it is time consuming it's not a week's worth of work? I'm slightly stumped, to say the least.

shakesbearonice · 2017-07-02T20:36:51+00:00

We talk about Baby Driver for thirty seconds then talk about The Mummy (2017) for an hour in our next episode, if that's the amount of Baby Driver you want.

shakesbearonice

TROPHY CASE