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Thread: Please tell me what you think of this outline

  1. #1
    Senior Member Evidently Supermarioman's Avatar
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    Post Please tell me what you think of this outline

    I wrote this film outline earlier, and I'd like to know what everyone here thought of it.
    Being a outline, these are only the key scenes, but it should be enough to get a idea of what it would be like.

    The Third Day Outline

    Scene 1: Short title credits run, "I am become death" quote used for context.

    scene 2: Flyover of Honolulu, settle on a home.

    scene 3: A Teenage boy is on the phone with his mother who is working downtown, his friends are waiting outside for him.

    Scene 4: The Phone conversation is suddenly and violently cut off by a massive nuclear explosion. The camera stays with the boy during a scene of unfathomable, apocalyptic chaos and destruction, Incredible, horrifying sound. Sudden cut to black.

    scene 5: The boy awakens mildly injured in shattered debris of home, he stumbles outside into the street, revealing mushroom cloud, dust, smoke and haze.

    scene 6: The boy dazedly wanders toward the wreck of another home down the street, and passes burned shadows on the ground that are possibly his friends.

    scene 7: The boy nears the home, which suddenly explodes, flinging the boy into a smashed car, breaking his leg.

    scene 8: The boy uses a shattered stop sign pole as crutch, drags himself back to his home in tears from pain.

    scene 9: The boy uses a tattered sheet in a attempt to keep out choking dust from a corner of his broken home, and also uses a box of bandages to cover his initial injuries, the sun sets.

    scene 10: The boy sits on his broken roof at night, looking out over a leveled and burning landscape. Eventually he shuffles into his "safe" corner in the home, and falls asleep.

    scene 11: The boy, using the pole cane, a makeshift filter mask of torn cloth, and with renewed determination to survive, sets out for a nearby store to find food.

    scene 12: The boy searches the wreckage for food, finds some things he thinks he can eat, and leaves with a single road flare.

    scene 13: A deranged man attacks the boy, beats him with the boy's cane, and steals his food.

    scene 14: The boy returns to his leveled home as sun sets again. He uses the flare to burn pieces of colored cloth found in his home in a makeshift vigil for his friends, then returns to the "safe" corner and begins to break down.

    scene 15: The boy coughs up blood soon after waking on the third day, and realizes he will likely die of radiation poisoning before he can be rescued.

    scene 16: The boy leaves the home sans mask and walks to ground zero, despite the futility of searching for his mother.

    scene 17(final): The boy, nearing death, begins to hallucinate. Thousands of pillars of light begin to ascend into the sky, and he follows a image of his mother to a beach, where he finally succumbs to his illness, but not before being held one last time in his mother's arms.
    I enjoy blank walls.

  2. #2
    I like "sad"--at least by the common viewer's standards--endings, and yours has a nice positive twist. It's a good plot, I think, and an interesting concept to focus on the boy trying to survive rather than save the world. If this were to be a feature-length movie, you'd need more stuff--subplots, the works--to fill the time up, because what you have here wouldn't hold an audience's interest for at least an hour and a half.

  3. #3
    Give the boy some significance. Maybe make his mom the one that somehow accidently causes the nuke to go off -- she works at the local nuclear power plant or she interrupts a terrorist with a suitcase nuke getting on a plane.
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  4. #4
    Senior Member Evidently Supermarioman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NGS View Post
    I like "sad"--at least by the common viewer's standards--endings, and yours has a nice positive twist. It's a good plot, I think, and an interesting concept to focus on the boy trying to survive rather than save the world. If this were to be a feature-length movie, you'd need more stuff--subplots, the works--to fill the time up, because what you have here wouldn't hold an audience's interest for at least an hour and a half.
    Yeah, I figured that I should just write out the key scenes first, and then start adding more minor scenes as I go on.
    Thank you very much for the input.

    (I don't know if I should put a smiley there, considering the subject matter)


    Give the boy some significance. Maybe make his mom the one that somehow accidently causes the nuke to go off -- she works at the local nuclear power plant or she interrupts a terrorist with a suitcase nuke getting o a plane.
    It may sound really corny, but I figured the thing that would make the boy significant is that he's human.

    The second idea is really good though, that would be a great set up for the nuke scene.
    Last edited by Supermarioman; 01-25-2010 at 01:08 AM.
    I enjoy blank walls.

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