SHORT: Game Night (Hawk Teflon short)

My only problem was the audio which has already been discussed. I found myself laughing outloud pretty often. I do kind of wish the father had stopped at "Is there something you forgot to tell me...?" Then let us figure out what the issue was (really how did we not know already LOL). But I loved the general amount of uncomfortable situations. The bathroom one stood out to me. The blank looks from the lead spoke volumes. I liked also liked how when everything was going okay and suddenly a game of Scrabble becomes his worst nightmare. That part where the dad says "You don't like to finish sentences much..." also got a big laugh. For some reason the dad reminds me of D. L. Hughley.

-Nate
 
Apart from all the technical stuff others have pointed out, I'd say the biggest things for me were the pacing and the ending.

It feels like this thing could be half as long. You're spending too much time getting to the point, I think. And the final joke didn't really feel like a punchline to me. More like another gag before the big payoff.

Editing wise, I think you're just lingering too much in general. Seems like it just needed a lot of trimming. A clever concept, but the acting really dragged it down. For such a dialogue-driven piece, you really ought to hold out for some talent.

Having said all that, a lot of the compositions were nice. It's just hard to judge this one fairly since the acting was so atrocious. No offense to your friends. The Dad was almost watchable. :)
 
I guess I could throw down some notes about the script. This is my area of concentration, so hopefully I can help. Here' goes...



The Setup:
You have a great setup with a lot of potential. "Date night" archetypes are packed with little gems of scenes, where the characters can really go to town and shine through the great dialogue, hilarious faux pas, and misconstrued encounters.

A prime example of such a film is Meet the Parents. A typical kind of setup where the protagonist has to battle for the acceptance of the in-laws-to-be, only to make one huge mistake after another that sets him farther and farther from his primary goal. Because it is a comedy, it ends happily with union, represented as marriage between protagonist and Helen of Troy* (subplot) and the in-laws' acceptance of the protagonist (main plot). Another great example would be My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was nominated for best screenplay, too.

There is so much potential in these stories because the writer's creativity can really run wild with the sticky situations in which the protagonist can find himself.

In your case, your protagonist is a sheepish, thin white boy dating a black girl. Good! This sets us up pretty quickly for a lot of laughs. The key here is, though, pay it off!

If we were to watch a feature, in which the protagonist meets a cute girl, whom he puts the moves on, and she's in every other scene, and the romantic fires are sparking...and then she's absent for the rest of the movie, we will all demand our money back.

You do tap into the racial issue here, but there is a lot more you could take away from it. Immediately when your protagonist walks into the house, the first conflict should take place. We get an idea of it when the dad says something like, "You're my African princess. You should have an African king," which did make me laugh, but that really only tells us who the dad is. By the time we move to the next scene, we really haven't seen any inkling of a conflict along the racial lines, and all we know about our protagonist is that he is a white boy. That’s not enough.

Tap into the uncomfortable situations the race-issue creates. Let your creativity frolic in the daisies with this one.



Characters:
Like others have said, the dry acting does leave much to be desired, but there is something as a writer (or writer-director) you can always do to help give your characters some thickness: Eye-patching your character. It is a technique used to do a few things.

1) It marks your protagonist as your protagonist, if done right. This does not mean you cannot eye-patch other characters, as you should, but it does mean that if you eye-patch a supporting character first, we become disinterested in what the protagonist has to offer. In this case, we see the dad is somewhat of a racist, and we only really want to follow him for the rest of the story. The protagonist now becomes a prop for the dad to wield. Not good!

2) Lure us into the film. An average 20-year old white male (like me) is boring, unless he has something that makes him worth our time. This is especially important in shorts, where we need to get sucked in during the first 30 seconds, or we'll think "It's just another short/student film/yadayada."

This is not the only way to hook us, and you do not need to necessarily dress your character with an eye-patch (unless you're making a pirate film), but giving the protagonist a nervous tic, like hiccups or something (don't use the inhaler cliche...), or placing him on the doorstep only to realize his fly is stuck open, so he spends the duration of the film trying to conceal it, ultimately leading to a very embarrassing scene that would enrage the dad even more...you get the idea.


In a five-minute short, four characters really is the most you can go before things start to get tiresome, so props for not casting your entire football team from high school.

You used a formulaic setup, but it is a formula because it works well. Think That 70’s Show: Eric, Donna, Red, and Kitty (boy, girlfriend, boy’s dad, boy’s mom, if you’re not familiar with the show). Eric is a sheepish, thin white boy. Donna is radical. Red is a military hardass. And Kitty is a hilarious stressed out mother. The great thing about this formula is that you have character complements. Eric is somewhat timid and trying to work on a relationship, like your protagonist, and his girlfriend Donna is a free spirit, whom Red questions and thus insults Eric for. Kitty complements Red’s thick skin by being fluffy and nice and sweet and quirky to all hell. These characters are set up in such a way that any two can cross wires and there will be sparks – sparks that make us laugh every step of the way.

Now look at your characters. The dad is a hardass and kind of racist, which works to insult the protagonist and make us sympathize with him. It’s also funny! The protagonist, however, doesn’t give us a lot to chew on because his unique trait is that he’s “nervous.” Of course he’s nervous! I would be, too. But we need more for us to really sink our teeth into and step into his shoes, making us more uncomfortable, more sympathetic, and more prone to laugh!

The daughter and the mother are like furniture in this film. The mother doesn’t even speak to the father except for her opening line, if I remember correctly. Discourse between the sugary sweet mother and the judgmental father would have been priceless. The daughter is too much like the mother. She’s somewhat two-dimensional. Eye-patch her with a good quirk. Her quirk could even be her uncontrollable addiction to white men! Maybe she ends up groping the protagonist while the dad is in the same room but looking the other way. That would make the protagonist even more nervous. Her affinity for the other white meat would also set off the father even more, but because he loves his only daughter** so dearly, he redirects his anger to the protagonist she so admires, scrutinizing his every move to see if he can see what his daughter sees. You see? This is called escalation: By increasing the tension between the characters and the caliber of their conflicts, the audience becomes enamored!

You did an excellent job complementing the dad and the protagonist, and their interactions are pretty laugh-out-loud funny. “I didn’t hear you flush” was very smart, and you built on it by saying “Who were you talking to” and “You don’t like finishing sentences, do you?” Nicely done.

The littlest things could tell us a lot among these characters. Try to keep eye-patching, complementing, and escalation in mind, especially in little shorts like this, when writing your next screenplay. Please note that eye-patching does not need to be blunt – really, don’t put a giant purple hat on the father character jus’ cuz’. It needs to tell us something and make the character pop off the screen. It could be subtle or even intangible! Complementing characters in a short comedy is a tried and trusted design. Use it and abuse it.



Structure:
The last element I’ll delve is the skeleton of your script. All films have three acts (if they’re done right). You have Act I, which begins with the film and ends with the inciting incident, Act II, which is the body of the script that takes us from inciting incident to the second major plot point, and Act III, which begins after the second major plot point, contains the climax, and ends with the film.

In addition to this structure, your scenes should each have three acts. In filmspeak, a scene is where the camera stays in the same physical location, like a room, without cutting away to another location, as if a person were standing on the tripod observing the immediately perceivable events. Now, implementing the three acts of a scene can obviously break this rule a tad, like in post when you cut away to another scene for a quick shot that tells us something we need to know, but the container of a scene should have three acts, nonetheless.

You should start by establishing the main characters of a scene as the characters to watch. If it’s just two characters, and we are following one of them, say, the protagonist, lead us with the protagonist’s actions into the scene. You actually do this quite well from a directorial aspect, and the script does somewhat lead us from scene to scene, like with, “Wanna help set the table,” and “Earn your keep by playing Scrabble,” because the next scenes pay off these lines. So, props there.

However…the scenes tend to drag in their beginnings. This works on the front that it makes us uncomfortable like your protagonist, but it runs out of gas quickly, and there isn’t a lot of good dialogue or actions that establish the intentions of each scene. For example, the scene in the living room with the dad and the protagonist starts kind of slowly. We get that they’re still waiting for the girlfriend to come out of her room, but the whole scene drags and it is not established cleanly what the scene’s intention is.

In a short, this is both somewhat forgivable and potentially more volatile than in a feature. Because we know the movie won’t take too long, we can tough it out and wait for the scenes to pick up if the beginning is weak, but this also can establish a watch-checking behavior in your audience that you don’t want! I’ll also mention that you began the living room scene with the dad, crossword puzzle book in hand. You could have built on that idiosyncrasy right then and there instead of waiting for the scrabble scene, or it should have been removed completely, as it did nothing to set the tone of the scene.

The middle of each scene is like an Act II. Your middles are actually quite good because they have major conflict, which is what films are really about. Some of your confrontations really are hilarious and make us keep watching. Using the beginning of a scene as a setup, you can springboard the protagonist into conflict in a matter of moments, which means more laughs and a happier audience.

The end of a scene should act as a bridge into the next. Again, you do this pretty well because your ending dialogue invites us into the next scene. Teamed with good lighting and fluid screen direction, your film can flow like the Mississippi. Part of the success of your film was in keeping things somewhat fluid.

Lastly, the big pay off needs to be, well, big. Your final punch line is funny, but it feels like another joke in a comedian’s grab bag rather than a strong climax. I could see you tacking on another minute or two to wrap up completely. It is a comedy, so give us union! Let’s see the girl and guy get together, and let’s see how the dad takes it. Is he reluctant but acceptant? Does he threaten the young man that he’ll castrate him with sheep sheers if he gets his daughter pregnant? We’re missing a lot here at the end.

As others have said, you could have really played around with the Scrabble scene. It screamed with potential energy, and I frowned when the movie was over. Like Perrone said, don’t insult your viewers’ intelligence. A quick joke caught by some is a lot better than a lame joke caught by everyone. This is why great comedies have replay value. Think Dodgeball. How many little puns and punchlines are in that movie? A lot. You could have elaborated on why Scrabble is THE family game here. Something to do with the dad’s domineering behavior merging with his addiction to word puzzles? Give us a hint…

Also, this feels like the third act of your film, since the dinner was more like the second major plot point, where the second act finishes. Stick your climax right in the center of Act III, and you’ll have a good story. It most likely should have dealt with the father’s acceptance and the daughter’s dual happiness in that both her men are happy.



On a completely unrelated note: Please keep your credits short and sweet. In all honesty, we don’t care who you are special thanking or who your boom operator was. Squeeze it all onto cards and move through them quickly. I thought this film would be about 6 minutes, where 17 seconds would be credits, but you had about 90 seconds of end credits. Give us the beef, not the garnish :)



I hope that wasn’t too much…I tried to keep it all relevant to your film. I hope you can take away something from it, produce better films with stronger impacts, and leave us wanting more.


Cheers and good luck on your next projects!


*[I called the woman figure "Helen of Troy" because no story framework is truly original, but rather they all pay homage to The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, where all of these battles of human character - man v. man, man v. God, man v. nature, man v. himself, man v. society - and all the story types - tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, etc. - were canonized as western literature tradition. Your main character here is Achilles/Odysseus, and his girlfriend is Helen/Penelope.]

**[The science of birth order study – developed by Dr. Kevin Leman – involves how the order in which children are born into a family (like older, middle, and youngest) and the size of the family (only child, middle of three, youngest by ten years, etc.) effects the personalities of the children and the parents. Its most elementary understanding can be an invaluable tool in writing family dynamics because it allows you to speak through the mouths of the characters instead of trying to put words into their mouths.]
 
Last edited:
Wow. First off, thanks for checking it out. Second, thanks for such an in-depth response. That's why I love this site.

I have to admit that I thought "eye patching" was some form of coaxing or directing you were talking about. I didn't realize you meant actually putting an eye patch on one of them. I see what you're saying now, though. Make them stand out in some way. Play up the differences more so rather than blending them into the background.

In all honesty, thank you for your reply to this. It's really helping me a lot to get feedback from people. I know that this message seems short, but please know that I am listening to everything people are saying!
 
No problem. It was fun to watch. And I am in love with this site, too. I've learned so much, had so many ideas sparked, that I feel I'm somewhat obliged to give back when I can.

About eye-patching: The subtler, the better, in almost all cases. We've seen so many BAD eye-patches in movies that are cliches, 100% physical, and usually identify the character before he/she even opens his/her mouth, which is not always what you want. Take, for example, every bad action movie you've seen. The bad guy has a ginormous scar on his face, is missing an ear, has a limp, is missing an eye, or something, and it just screams bad script when that is all we notice in the character. The general in Avatar, anyone...

But it can be done right, too. Think of any movie where you saw a character - good or bad - whose physical eye-patch worked in tandem with his psychological fallacies. You both hated and felt for, loved and sympathized with that character. That emotional twist tearing the audience apart makes great film. The first example that comes to mind is The Joker's self-inflicted trademark in The Dark Knight. You want to sympathize/empathize with him because he told you his father did it...and then he says he did it to himself because he loved his wife so much...but he's f**kin evil and crazy. It's troubling, and that's great eye-patching.

The best eye-patches are psychological with physical manifestations. If you can get behind that, it'll color your character's dialogue and sound legitimate. It's tons and tons of fun eye-patching characters, putting them in a room together, and seeing how they interact.

I wish you luck with your next projects. Have fun!
 
Last edited:
It's funny you should mention the scars and things. As I was reading what you were saying, I was thinking about everyone with scars on their faces and the likes. The only character that I can recall off the top of my head with a scar on their face that isn't bad would be John Locke (from LOST). Even his goodness/badness seems debatable, though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top