These are some things to think about when giving feedback on a screenplay. They may or may not be applicable for every scene.

The goal of the writing is to elicit an emotional response. Before you get into what about the writing worked or didn’t work, take a note of your emotional response to the material. This isn’t how you feel about the quality of the writing, but what emotional response the writing created in you.

Yes No

___ ___ Do you know what it is about? (Guy searches for true love etc).

___ ___ Do you know what genre it is? (Comedy, Romance, etc).

___ ___ Do you know who the protagonist is?

___ ___ Do you like the protagonist?

___ ___ Do you know what the protagonist’s weakness is?

___ ___ Do you know what the protagonist’s strength is?

___ ___ Do you know what the protagonist’s emotional need is? (eg. Get self-respect, be responsible, be an adult, love and be loved etc).

___ ___ Do you know what the protagonist is trying to physically accomplish or acquire?

___ ___ Is what the protagonist has at stake big enough? (Is the consequence of failure really damaging?)

___ ___ Is the hero active (not passive and not reactive)

___ ___ Is the plot information clearly conveyed?

___ ___ Is everything externally described?

External (good): “He looks pleadingly into her eyes”.

Internal (bad): “He doesn’t understand her change of heart”.

___ ___ Is the screenplay in proper format?

___ ___ Is the scene description effectively spaced? (ie. no big blocks of descriptive text).

___ ___ Is ALL of the dialogue natural? (Not on the nose, not subtext spoken, not out of character)

___ ___ Does the dialogue move the plot along, help characterize the person speaking or help to establish the tone of the scene? (Not excessive exposition, not overwritten, no excessive dialects)

___ ___ Is the action plausible?

___ ___ Are you able to keep track of who each character is and what their function is within the story?

___ ___ Is the overall conflict engaging and worthy of a movie?