Diem
Agent of Phaaze
It is; mine's probably going to be sent out a week from today. So mine's coming a week after hers, which will be an interesting comparison. They're both scripts for animated shows, and apparently hers is so long because it has to set up so much of the world, which is partially why mine is long, too. But I can't say for certain until I get ahold of her script what the differences are.
The really interesting difference between us, though, is that this girl owns an animation studio. Like, a legitimate business. I don't know much more than that, but I'd imagine that means that she knows a thing or two, at least. Seems to give some intelligent feedback on other people's scripts in class.
So I'm thinking either it's a script full of good ideas that just needs to be cut down, or it's overlong and bloated with unnecessary things and needs to be reworked. But who knows.
Yeah, in screenwriting, apparently, one page is supposed to be equivalent to a minute on the screen. It's not always true, given how some things can take longer or shorter depending on a variety of factors, but yeah, the professor said that he was definitely going to talk about how we can cut it down when we bring it up next week. 166 pages is almost 2.5 hours in that equation.
The girl who wrote it oddly wasn't in class today, so she wasn't there to explain it. The professor said what I mentioned above about how it had to set up the world, but he didn't say anything more specific. Sounds like it went through some small rewrites, too, and somehow came out even larger than before.
If that were me, I'd cut out whatever isn't necessary to the plot of the pilot. My script has very little worldbuilding or exposition about the world, because I wanted to focus mainly on the characters, their relationships, and their goals. The world is shown and discussed when it needs to be, so the basic premise and backstory is established both visually and through some lines of dialogue here and there, but otherwise I don't dwell on explaining every detail about how the world works, because that's something easily done over time in other episodes.
A lot of people seem to be writing their pilots in this class without thinking about what the following episodes are supposed to be, which is the most baffling thing about the whole class. If you asked me what comes after the pilot, I'd talk for hours. Most of my classmates get asked that by the professor, and most of them are clueless.
