Day 28 Assignments.

[Joe Donato]

Well, this took quite some time. I’d say it was a full 8 hours of work, to give each scene “equal time”. Many times it was very easy to just “settle”, and call it “good enough” and rest on my laurels that it’s way better than many movies I’ve seen in my day. But that’s not what I’m in for. I came this far, there’s no point in stopping pursuing excellence now. Yes I worked on flow, clarity, description and dialogue, but I’ve been doing that all along over the past 30 days as well. And one scene near the end is way too long, so I just marked that. I’ll shorten it later.

Here’s my notes on things I changed on this pass:

– tweaked a lot of Act 1 dialogue between Ruth and Chuck: reworked it to make it more believable and dramatic.

– Shortened some lines of action description, while adding more action.

– I made sure that whenever there was long bouts of believable dialogue, that the tension/drama increased steadily line by line.

– Changed some of the order of events in scenes (like discovering license plate earlier, which allows them to doubt if its just one car or multiple cars they are seeing)

– In the previous draft, when Chuck buys a bunch of stuff at the convenience store, I had his wife pull them out one at a time as Chuck explained what they were for, but then I realized that it felt more entertaining to not reveal the items to the audience until he actually uses them against the zombie car.

– At the turning point, I finally came up with Chuck’s backstory, helping to explain his prejudice. I never said what Chuck did for a living, and I keep wondering if it matters to the story, and I only want to give him a job that is relevant to the story. But now we know he was forced into retirement because his company replaced him with a millenial who could do his job faster and cheaper with a computer program.

– Believabiliity was top priority for me as I tweaked dialogue and sequence of events. I really think my biggest challenge/goal for this was to make it feel “real” and as uncontrived as possible.

Done for now. Woohhooo!!!!!