Note: No, I have not sent out the newsletter this week. It’s been a busy weekend but I’m going to try and send it out tonight!
Genre: Animated (Pixar-ish)
Premise: (from writer) A lonely inventor builds a time machine, but finds it only works three minutes at a time.
About: Shorts Week was a newsletter-only opportunity. To sign up and make sure you don’t miss out on future Scriptshadow opportunities, e-mail me at the contact page and opt in for the newsletter (if you’re not signed up for the newsletter already).
Writer: Christy McGee
Details: 9 pages
So what makes a good short? It’s a question man has been asking since the dawn of time. “What is the meaning of life?” and then “What makes a good short script?” Unfortunately, there haven’t been a whole lot of venues to write short scripts, so the focus of them has been limited almost exclusively to directors who want to make short movies. They write short scripts pretty much by necessity. Oftentimes these short scripts are terrible, piece-mailed together to set a particular tone, get a particular shot or land a particular joke they love. Little to no focus has been put on the script itself.
Which is why you’re looking to me this week to give you the answer. You’ve spent your entire lives wondering how to write one of these things. If there’s anyone who should know how, it’s Scriptshadow. Errr, not so fast. I did Shorts Week for two reasons. One, there was an outburst of demand. People NEEDED this week for some reason. And two, I myself wanted to learn how to write a good short. I mean, there just haven’t been any situations for which I’d need to read shorts. So this was just as much an opportunity for me to learn as you guys.
Now I’m ASSUMING a good short, like a good script, has a setup (Act 1) a conflict (Act 2) and a resolution (Act 3). So that’s what I’m looking for. But honestly, I’m just looking for anything that stands out in some way. And that’s proven harder to find than you’d think. I’ve read a ton of bad shorts. The biggest issue I ran into was writers choosing ideas where not much happened. Lots of scripts had people sitting in rooms talking, almost like something you’d shoot as a student film to practice basic blocking techniques with actors. Nothing actually exciting, interesting, or different. The way I see it, you only have a very short time to tell your story in a short so it’s gotta stand out in some way. Normal and cliché are adjectives you want to stay as far away from as possible. With that established, let’s check out today’s short.
Luigi lives in the kind of small Steampunk town that I sure as hell wish existed in reality. He makes his living as an inventor and his latest invention is a backpack that allows him to travel through time. So excited is Luigi about his device that he’s called a town meeting to show it off.
Once everyone is at the town square, Luigi shows them an old newspaper with a picture of the square. He’ll go back in time and make sure to appear IN that picture to prove his contraption works. Luigi presses his magic time-traveling backpack button but…nothing. He presses it again. Nothing. People start to leave. He presses it a third time. Almost everyone has left. Luigi is devastated. Until he checks his watch. Wait, he actually HAS time traveled, but only 9 minutes backwards. People weren’t leaving. He’d just gone back to before they showed up! This means that his backpack is merely broken and only goes back 3 minutes at a time.
While not ideal, Luigi realizes he can still do a lot of good with his backpack. So he starts saving some cats, exposes some bank robbers, and offers instant replay to football games. Everything seems to be going swell until Luigi meets a little orphan girl who lost her mother to an accident while crossing the road.
Devastated, Luigi HAS to help this girl. So he does some research and finds the road where the woman was killed, but realizes it was an entire year ago. Since his backpack will only go back 3 minutes at a time, that means he’ll have to press it 178,776 times. Ouch. But if that’s the only way he can save this woman, then that’s what he has to do.
(spoiler) So Luigi heads back in time, saves the woman, and in the process falls in love with her. Cut to a year later and Luigi is part of the family: Mom, Luigi, and the little girl. He’s even created time-traveling backpacks for all of them and included them into his act. And this time when he gathers the entire town around, he’s ready. Or at least he thinks he is. When all three family members press their buttons, they, um…don’t exactly end up where they planned. To be continued.
The reason I liked this short was because it reminded me a lot of a Pixar short where the focus was on the storytelling and not on some boring dialogue exchange or some cool but ultimately thin sci-fi idea. “Time Well Traveled” was not only a rich storytelling experience, it was told without a single line of dialogue.
I realized that a ton of these shorts go on forever, like 20-25 pages, and yet they feel like nothing’s happened. We’re still in the same place on page 12 as we were on page 2. Yet “Time Well Traveled” feels like dozens of things have happened within that span. Clearly, this is the result of not including dialogue. Dialogue eats up pages because it takes up so much space. You wouldn’t notice that in a regular script at 110 pages long, but you certainly notice it with shorts.
I’m not saying that shorts should never include dialogue. But if you’re looking at this and my favorite short of the week (which I’ll review Friday), you’d be persuaded into thinking that the best way to tell a short is via images and not dialogue.
The thing is, when you’re not using dialogue, it becomes quite challenging to convey key plot points and really anything in the story that’s nuanced. Indeed there were some things that didn’t make sense to me on the first go-around that I had to read the script twice to understand. For example, I didn’t totally get, at first, that each press of the button only went back 3 minutes. Therefore when he’s trying to figure out how to save the mother and he comes up with the number “178,776,” I was scratching my head trying to figure out what that number stood for (Oh! I realized. That’s how many times he has to press the button).
Also, I didn’t read the logline. And it wasn’t until I did that I realized Luigi was “lonely.” That made the story more powerful since he finds this family at the end. But for that to work, we need some images or actions at the beginning that clearly depict how lonely Luigi was. I don’t remember that so it’s something I’d really focus on in the next draft.
There were a couple of other things, like when tries to save the falling cat and when he sits at the bus stop, that had me a little unsure of what exactly was going on. These are things that are easy to take care of in a dialogue-centered piece but quite challenging without, so it really takes some skill (and effort) to pull them off. In the end, however, these moments were few and far between and this short script easily stood out from the rest. It probably needs a clarity rewrite. And I wouldn’t have minded one little extra twist at the end (I always feel like time travel stories need a final twist). But other than that, good stuff!
Script link: Time Well Traveled
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This script exemplifies the power of showing over telling. It also reminded me how much space can be saved if you show something rather than have characters tell us through dialogue.
What I learned 2: Make sure to be CLEAR when you are showing and not telling. It’s easy to assume that you’ve been super clever and conveyed what you’ve needed to convey through an image. But as this script showed, certain images or moments need extra clarity.
