Comments Made During the Contest

Ammar Salmi (Level 5)

The short that doesn't have a punchline always seems unsatisfying for me. When Devin explained everything about what they're up to, you didn't provide anything new. It worked. That what the script last pages said. I was waiting for something to go awry. What if they were put in a situation where they need the Cloud to be connected, and the bypass button is malfunctioning? That would be great. A horrifying ending. What if those guys disconnect your Cloud so they can do bad things to the kid? But the concept was so cool and original so I can overlook this. Well done.

Bill Sarre (Level 4)

Well that was different. To be honest I wasn't wholly sure what I was meant to be seeing for a portion of this then eventually I got the message about some form of futuristic tracking and monitoring system fitted into children. Keg an in the last scenes doesn't do or say much, is he needed.

An unusual idea but would benefit from some clarity at the beginning, and how the whoe script is filmed IMO.

All the best.

Byron Matthews (Level 4)

It took me awhile to figure out what was going but I finally got it. Pretty imaginative idea and quite creative. Kudos for that. The story was a bit confusing especially with the story switching from POVs; this would be something I would have to visually see to understand the world you've created. Devin seemed really useless after page one. It wasn't a bad story.

Chris Setten (Level 4)

This was a really neat idea and somewhat ahead of its time. However, I had some difficulty orienting myself and understanding the different POVs and what they meant. I'm still not sure how this ended although if I did, I think it's probably pretty funny.

Chris Westfield (Level 3)

Well this was a really creative premise. It was confusing at first as to how it was found footage but that becomes clear. Unfortunately I felt with such a great start... the end was a bit of a let down. I get the parallelisms to big brother watching but wasn't quite for me.

Christina Anderson (Level 4)

Good story.

I don't understand your vision for the cloud.
--Script structure makes it seem like a conference call, but the scenes and action make it seem like a normal shoot.
--are we supposed to carousel through all the boy's POV -or- do we have their mini-screens in view?

Take the surgery.
For awhile, it's normal action (boys in the woods, boys in a cave). Then for a moment, Ben's POV headlamps turn on. Boys talk, and...

Action; like a normal shoot (Hudson grabs Ben's head --- BUT if we're in Ben's POV, we wouldn't see Hudson grab our head, we'd get jarred, see Hudson up close). It continues like that for awhile, (we see the boys bully/console-- a good mix by the way) then,

SWITCH, we're in Ken's POV. Now this makes more sense, we stay with the onlooker BUT, here again it falls into a pattern of normal action sequences.

FOUND FOOTAGE should be rougher-- more like blurry shots while people move, and then for an instant the camera clears and we see what's about to happen-- two boys holding Ben- down, the one straddled over him poised with the knife. We don't see the cut-- our host has to move around for a better view, but we see opening and the chip.

Honestly, if this was any other contest I'd rate this higher. But this is found footage, and the script doesn't create that effect. (GOOD)

Darren Seeley (Level 3)

I was wondering where this was going, and while I was getting a bit weary of the POVs, the end reveal that the boys have cyborg/cybernetic enchancements like RoboCop or The Terminator was quite clever. However, in some brief scenes, I'm not sure whose "view" we are looking at (as ther is no "POV") that said, I wondered if the POVs were needed at all.

Still, this was decent in concept. Different.

David Serra (Level 4)

Let me see if I can answer this in the most lightest way posssible...

Is this set in the future? Is this suppose to be funny? Was I suppose to laugh?

I have no idea what i just read.

Derek Anderson (Level 4)

Am I out of the technological loop here? What's a cloud? Or a MyCloud?

I had to read this a couple times just to figure out what the FF angle was.

For what it's worth, the writing is excellent. But it was too much work for me to follow. Maybe it was just over my head. But I did not hurt your grade because of my ignorance. It's still a GOOD from me.

Derek Collins (Level 4)

Nice mixture of good scene descriptions and dialog. Very interesting take on the found footage theme. The story itself was to me, just alright. There just wasn't anything here story wise that really made it stand out to me. I mean it really just boils down to being a story about young boys and their obsession with seeing some boobies, as good as your cloud concept was I would have like to have seen something a little stronger in the execution of your idea. But the writing skills were spot on so good job as far as that goes.

Ethan Lane (Level 2)

Only a couple things I'd change:
The mom's dialogue doesn't really sound like something a mom would say. At all. So maybe work on that.
Can we get just a little more info on the first two kids? What they look like, etc?
(oh, and you have a few adjectives that need to be adverbs)

Otherwise, pretty cool!

Faith Friese Nelson (Level 5)

This script earned an excellent from me. The plot was original and the screenwriting spot on.

Just a few suggestions:

On page one: “perfectly manicured green grass”. I think the word GREEN can be deleted. It feels redundant to me.

On page 2: “Hudson snickers, roll his eyes...” I have read somewhere the actors do not like to be filmed “rolling their eyes.” Try to find something else for your character to do.

Proofread and spell check: On page 4, releif should be spelled RELIEF.

Fred Koszewnik (Level 5)

Your screenplay about a boy's individualization from his parents with an unusual sci-fi twist is highly imaginative and also very entertaining. I've read that every story has already been told a thousand times and can only be told in new annd different ways. But I think you've broken into new territory with your storyline. Congratulations. Your writing craft stands out as Excellent. AND is a genuine treat and inspiration to read. Continued good success.

Gary Rademan (Level 5)

Creative. The story confused me as to who it was about. I think fewer characters would help streamline this into a great short.

Jaclyn Boser (Level 3)

While I like that this is different, I'm not sure five pages is enough to grasp and run with the idea of a cloud cam. Is this like a chip planted in dogs to keep them safe, but for humans? A futuristic babysitting or tracking device? Have humans become robots? Preteen boys 'coming of age' and trying to immerse themselves in he more adult world of booze and sex is nothing new but I think this was a bit too scattered to have the impact it's capable of. Seems as though the boys are trying to pull the electrical wool over their mothers' eyes, but I think a bit more background would have been helpful for comprehension of the unknown reader.

Jeff Ferry (Level 4)

This script is well formatted and very professional. I saw no sloppy errors. The story is an excellent idea done with a "good" level of writing. I think one or two more passes and this an excellent. As it stands I find it a step below that. The characters are passably written in the short time you have, but I think you overestimate the amount of knowledge people have about technology. If someone isn't familiar with "the cloud" you might have a lost reader. Good luck.

Jordan Littleton (Level 4)

Title: 6
Story: 6
Originality: 8
Action: 6
Dialogue: 6
Readability: 7

This was very original. I liked it for the most part, but like all of our scripts, I think it could have been tightened up a little bit. Well done.

Kelley Allen (Level 3)

First off, kudos for being gutsy enough to enter this month's MP contest. Not a lot of folks did enter(including myself out of sheer laziness) and I was intrigued to see how this topic would be handled.

Initial Gut Reaction: I'm confused. Where's the cameras???

Story: Interesting. I like your take on "the Cloud". However, there needs to be more of a "payback" since there is not a lot of conflict here with Benner. I think we need to feel bad for this poor kid and we, as the audience, don't.

Formatting: You use a tremendous amount of "CONTINUOUS", O.S. and POV shots, which are probably not necessary. Otherwise, good.

Dialogue: Pretty good. You captured the essence of young obnoxious boys out to cause some havoc.

Characters: Too many characters that are too much alike. You could probably ditch Hudson and Kegan without too much impact to the story. Benner and Devin are the only two characters that really matter.

Nit-picking: "Releif" should be spelled "relief"

My own personal reaction: Not too keen about all the bad language and vulgarity. Confusing on the first read. I read it again and I still don't quite get it. However, the "Cloud" concept is clever.


Good luck and keep writing!

Khamanna Iskandarova (Level 5)

I think it's a bit complicated for what it is. I mean not the way you written this, but the story is a bit too layered for my tastes. It started slow and implied a different story. Then it changed somewhat abruptly and I thought that there was no hinting of the boy reaching maturity (or whatever it is) on your first two pages.
Then I felt lost and had to reread, but I'm still not sure if I understood what happened there.

Kirk White (Level 5)

a nice use of the parameters of the challenge. Very clever and, in all honesty, PROPHETIC story. Think this has great potential and I’d love to see this made. Giving a very good.

KP Mackie (Level 5)

Clever. Had a little trouble early on keeping track of the four boys. Devin and Benner were clear at the beginning; no definitive physical descriptions, but their individual dialogue contrasts well enough. Hudson and Kegan got detailed physical descriptions.
Wonder whether three boys (rule of three?), Devin, Benner and Hudson, would have made the action a bit easier to follow. Kegan's apparently Hudson's flunkie; he doesn't have any dialogue.
Silly perhaps, but that final view of "Benner's pale, white butt" running off into the forest is a terrific visual.

Margaret Ricke (Level 5)

I had a difficult time orienting myself through the beginning, but I did get the visuals with some work. It was probably due to my own fatigue, but see if anyone else mentions it just in case.

Using the "POV" works well for this.

I really like this story. I like the kids. They're individual, interesting, and have their own voices.

I didn't notice any spelling or punctuation errors.

Very nice.

Martin Jensen (Level 5)

I like how you gradually establish the concept of the cloud without long and boring exposition.

I'm not quite sure what happened at the end.

Still, this is an interesting story and you managed the changes in POV very well. Very good.

Masoud Soheili (Level 4)

Is it really "Found Footage" of something?
I didn't understand well.
I think you didn't write "actions" well.
I heard somewhere after new Sequence ,should write "action" first,
Should describe where we are and what will happen first,then write dialogues...
but here :

EXT. WOODS - CONTINUOUS
BENNER’S MOM (V.O.)
Benner! Where have you been?! I was
just about to call th--


Am I right?

Matthew Fettig (Level 5)

Interesting concept. What I gather from this is that we're not actually seeing things through a camera, but that each boy's actual perspective is electronically available to others through this "tethered Cloud".

I understand that the process for this contest makes it tough to write easily. While I could follow your actions fairly easily, it wasn't always clear from who's perspective we were looking. At the top of page 2, your line "The boys walk toward some woods..." makes it sound like we're seeing the group of 4 walking away. Since we should still be in Kegan's POV, I think it would read more clearly if you described what boys were walking in front of Kegan toward the woods.

In the next 2 scene headings, we're not told from who's perspective we're looking.

Then we get Benner's POV again, followed by Kegan's. At the top of page 4 you write "Hudson straddles Benner and Kegan kneels next to him." It seems like that would have to come from a different POV than Kegan, or be described differently. The last section with Benner's mom talking to him also seems to miss a description of the POV.

I like the ending with all the trash that's visible from Hudson's POV.

For a tough assignment, this was done pretty well and with an interesting story.

MJ Hermanny (Level 5)

I'm really dithering over how to rate this - I think I'm going to go excellent but the only thing making me hesitate is the complete lack of clarity over the footage and cameras at the beginning.

You pay it off brilliantly at the end and I had just about grasped the idea by page 2 but then you wandered around without giving me any clues as to how I was seeing things until they get down to the business of removing it.

Brilliantly imaginative and very well drawn characters with strong dialogue. A very cool piece of futuristic sci-fi. It's startlingly similar to a classmate's piece of work - he won't be best pleased when i tell him tomorrow!!

Well done.

Pete Barry (Level 5)

Very well conceived and executed sci-fi. Topical, too. It's a harrowing exploration of how far these kids will go to get away from their parent's watchful eyes - and not too farfetched. It slips nicely from cloud watching to an ominous cave-trek to horror-movie surgery. Nice use of the "eye-cams" - this is a perfect way to utilize "found footage".

It takes a little head-scratching to get the first few "shots" - I understood the first one pretty easily, but the "picture-in-picture" got convoluted quickly, with Mom's VO. I sorted it out, and on-screen, it would work, but it slowed the read.

I also think the kids dive into total hedonism pretty fast. No wonder these parents worry - within three seconds of freedom, these kids are shooting porn directly into their brains and running naked through the woods. What ever happened to "gateway drugs"?

In fact, unless I missed it, there's a slight problem with the procedure - Mom knows the connection has been cut. So if this kid's going home, there's going to be trouble immediately. Consider a more terrible solution - maybe the kid runs away for good. If you want to get into real Ray Bradbury stuff, maybe the kid goes back home to murder dear old ever-watchful Mum. I'm fine with the idea that constant supervision has eroded these kid's moral centers, so up the consequences.

Overall, a provoking and excellent piece that just leave me with a few questions.

Philip Whitcroft (Level 5)

The story in this works fine and has a good sci-fi issue in it.

I was initially confused over what was going on with the cloud, so I'd suggest seeing if there is a clearer way to set up what it is.

For me it felt a little strange that this was found footage, because their situation seems to call for establishing shots and regular camera angles.

Raymond Kwok (Level 3)

Took me a while to catch on to what's going on. But this is really neat. And it really works well with the concept of POV of cameras. It is well written and brings into play a difficult concept of cloud cameras with the greatest of ease. There are a few small errors: "relief" "Hedlite".

Reginald Beltran (Level 4)

The script is technically clean.

However, I felt that the found footage element was just thrown in there to fit the requirements of found footage. I would have preferred to have seen the whole thing in one perspective if possible.

The multiple switching of POV felt confusing. In fact, I turned it off in my mind just to get a sense of the story. Maybe, if filmed the fast/multiple switching of POV might work.

Reginald McGhee (Level 0)

I haven't notice any grammar errros.

This is the story of three guys being operated by a camera. His mother invading his privacy bugs out Benner. He begins using his friends to implant something in his body to exterminate his mother, which is funny, so that Benner can watch the clouds without his mother bothering him. I find this piece original. However, a few errors in logic I noticed. Why on Earth would Bennie exterminate his mom for? And he feels no remorse for doing this. I find this a bit unbelievable because we don’t often see people instantly feeling cold-hearted after killing their parents. After all, I don’t know what his parents are like, or what the relationship between Benner and Mom is.

The action lines are brief and to the point. I have not notice any formatting errors either. You packed up a lot of story in five pages, and all these action lines feel like a full story and not disrupted by any unnecessary scenes. That’s good pacing and good work.

Your dialogue rings true. Each character have distinctive voices. And as up now, this is the best screenplay with the best lines of dialogue compared to the other screenplays. Even the mother has her own dialogue, even though she doesn’t have much film time in the screenplay.

The characters are all real. But I feel Benner’s character a bit unbelievable when he exterminated his mother. I don’t know. Perhaps his character was forced. This did look like a larger story trying to condense itself in a small five-page screenplay. I also found it a bit unbelievable that he would go out and risk his chance to someone, even though they are friends. But I think you needed to break the forth wall to make the story work.

Overall, I think this is a Very Good read.

Rik Battaglia (Level 3)

What the hell! LOL! What was this? Kinda lost, cloud? The writing and format was great, but i still don't understand the whole thing. The ending was funny though! I thought the cave part would be epic, but what the hell do i know. This was fair.

Rustom Irani (Moderator)

I like the idea of the cameras embedded inside the boys heads, but am quite confused with your choice of POVS then. It's bascially every characters POV like a regular film then and I don't think it quite works in execution like you enivisoned.

The conflict is simple enough with some nice satire, though the end comes across more as a parable of sorts and seems part of a much, much larger story.

In fact the camera pov/hud views make me curious to see the whole world that you've created and learn more about the characters.

The pacing does slow down a bit in between as the stakes don't seem that high, but more personal.

Overall though this is a good job and with a bit of polish be really great!

Scott Merrow (Level 5)

Wow! I've just read through this once, and I have absolutely no idea what's going on. Let me give it another read.

Okay, I get it now. Kind of a tough read. We're in some kind of future world where people have computers with optical/visual sensors implanted in them, and they can share information via a "data cloud". And, apparently, parents can tap into their kids' clouds and monitor their behavior (see what they're seeing, hear what they're hearing, etc.). So, some enterprising kids figure out a way to bypass these systems (for a price) and prevent the "Big Brother" parents from snooping on their kids.

Now that I get it, I really like the story, and I think it would make a pretty cool movie. But it is a very difficult read. I'm not sure how to fix it, but here are a couple thoughts: 1) You get us off to a rocky start with Devin and Benner looking at naked ladies in the clouds, and semi-opaque buttons appearing in the sky, and Devin drawing on a cloud, etc. I had NO idea what that was all about, so (in my mind) I started guessing. Is it a dream? Is it someone's surreal hallucination? Is it...whatever? It took a couple readings to get it. 2) The boys' names don't help. Devin, Benner, Kegan, Hudson. C'mon, help us out, how about a Joe or a Mike or even a Jason. I had to keep going back to remind myself who was who.

But, anyway, as I said, when I finally did get it, I really enjoyed it, and I think the movie version would be easier to understand than the written version.

My score: Very Good.

Shane Harkin (Level 3)

A little confusing, I had to read it through a couple of times to understand what was going on. Interesting little story though, points for originality. Very unique take on the found footage technique, I'd certainly be interested to see it realized on screen.

Steven Gulotta (Level 3)

Nice. I was confused at first, thinking that you were just using standard POVs. But then it revealed something more, robotics or stuff like that, futuristic to a point. It was somewhat funny, and I also enjoyed the ending where he flickers through porn, as most young boys would want to. GOOD.

Sylvia Dahlby (Level 5)

Cool premise, and not so far fetched in the increasingly wired world. I thought the characters well drawn & dialog very good. The only thing I wasn't feeling was a sense of consequence or danger, maybe add more risk at the end?

Tom Pinks (Level 1)

I didn't particularly feel gripped from the start, the tension took a fair amount of time to build up but otherwise the characters are written brilliantly.

The structure feels a bit loose at times and I felt myself drifting off now and again.

The layout is pitch perfect though and the writer has obviously taken time in presenting in a professional manner.

Comments Made After the Contest

MJ Hermanny (Level 5) ~ 7/1/2012 7:10 AM

This was great Mike - don't be put off by some of the reviewers' lack of imagination - honestly, if a story isn't spoon fed to them from A to Z they won't like it, and this is unusual and visual once you got into your story. Tidy up the beginning and I think you've got something really unique here. Sorry you didn't even get an HM.

Mike Senkpiel (Level 4) ~ 7/1/2012 1:55 PM

Thanks MJ. It was a bit difficult deciding how to convey this. I considered just simply explaining the beginning, but I kind of wanted the viewer to wonder what's going on at first. I think this would come off better visually, but the read is what I'm trying to improve here, so I hope to apply everyone's helpful suggestions.

Scott Merrow (Level 5) ~ 7/1/2012 5:48 PM

Mike, I agree totally (and I mentioned it in my review), the movie version of this probably wouldn't be confusing. But the screenplay (especially the beginning) was a bit confusing on the first read-through.

Mike Senkpiel (Level 4) ~ 7/1/2012 9:56 PM

Thanks Scott for reading it again to see what I was trying to do and give helpful feedback. So I wanted this to gradually make sense to the viewer and so was just describing what they would see. But should I not do that for the script because it is hard to read? Should I explain to the reader that everyone has implanted web cams in their foreheads and speakers on their eardrums and are a part of a human collective www?

Personally, I tend to appreciate having to work to get if I like it once I get it. But obviously as a writer, I would like for as many people as possible to get it.

MJ Hermanny (Level 5) ~ 7/2/2012 7:49 AM

Mike, you shouldn't explain to the reader, you need to find a way of integrating it into the script through dialogue and action. Or if that's too difficult perhaps a Star Wars type scrolling board - I'd go for the former though, a conversation and some visuals between the characters.

perhaps mum at the beginning peering at her son, checking that it's working - she could be giving him a technical check list and him saying 'yes, mum' as each one scrolls across his vision.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll find a way.

Mike Senkpiel (Level 4) ~ 7/2/2012 9:30 AM

OK thanks MJ. I agree. I really like the opening scene in my head - and I think it would work great visually, but I'm just not sure how to make it easier to read on the page. I struggled with it, but perhaps I can do better in the rewrite without having to worry about the page count. I'm always having to cut stuff to stay at 5 pages.