Reviewing Scripts at Talentville pt 1
I’m not currently terribly active, but I’m a top reviewer over at Talentville, a community for screenwriters developed by Final Draft creator Ben Cahan. Last May, I got tired of seeing exceedingly lazy and rambling reviews trying to pass themselves off as feedback, so I pushed to have a system implemented wherein reviews, instead of being one big open box that you could write whatever in, would instead have entry fields (with word count minimums) for each of the categories that you have to rate on each script:
The idea wasn’t a popular one… few experienced reviewers wanted to be shoehorned into writing reviews restricted to the sections. But, it did give me an idea to create what I called the Review Checklist. Really, a prompting system, really… a list of questions that I, the reviewer, or anyone else who wanted to use it, could answer. If even half the questions were answered by the script reviewer, it’d make for a pretty thorough dissection of the script at hand.
It’s available to site members and I know it’s helped more than a few… especially new members of the site who are still finding their feet in terms of what to actually say about someone’s script. I use it extensively and it’s helped me deliver a ton of quality reviews (though I must say, I’m not a fast reviewer and I’d go bankrupt trying to make it as a professional script reader).
Over the next few blogs I’ll start diving into the checklist, and the questions that I try to answer on each script. They’re handy as a reviewer, and they’re handy as a writer as well… any question that a reviewer could pose of the script could be used by a writer to make the most of their script.
Next Up: CONCEPT