It's a learning process

Having perused all 266 pages of the script, I have come to face my demons and admit that my script is not up to par. Btw, I'm still struggling to upload my script onto Blogger as Blogger does not support PDF formats. If anyone has any suggestions, any programs or sites that I can upload my script onto, you know wata do.

Anyway, few things I've noticed about scripting:

1) Dialog. For a short film, either keep it minimal, or it has to be really entertaining. Due to the peculiar nature of my dialog for "Sweatshirts", I feel that it was imperative that the dialog is portrayed that way. In this sense, I feel that I have overcompensated that. The more I think about it, the more I feel I should have done away with the speech bubble formula.

2) Length (or duration) of short film. We haven't gotten any feedback yet, but I feel my script was far too long. Topping at just under 6 pages, there has been other successful scripts that were - gasp - under 2 pages. That's not to say the length does not matter (I feel strangely emasculated when I say this).

3) Inexperience. Before I wrote this script, I simply had no idea how a script was written. Diane's notes in the reading dossier came in really handy, but I found myself backtracking and referring to books and websites for another opinion. I could not find a script that could help - again due to the nature of my scripting - make my script better. It's really hard to convey a deaf man's thoughts, a foreign language and a comic-book style movie.

4) KISS. In future, I'll try to make it as simple as possible. Using "Sweatshirts" as a prototype, I'd have definitely done away with the comic-book conversations, and definitely changed the way Frankie was introduced.*

*Watching Play in the lecture and re-watching it on the Digidoss back home gave me a great idea, and also a lesson on how to introduce a character. The introduction to Play was quite simply, superb and I agree with David and Paul's take that had the dialog not been included in the short film, it would have been an amazing piece.

If I have the chance, I'll rewrite Frankie's intro.