Africanus (Historical Action/Drama 1st Act, 36 pgs)

Logline: Based on the life and military campaigns of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a man loved by his armies and despised by the senate, as he battles enemies foreign and domestic in his quest to keep Rome from falling at the hands of history's most infamous General, Hannibal Barca.

Africanus

So I've been working on this for a bit over a month now; it's essentially the 3.5 or 4th draft of my first act. I know the general consensus is to finish your story and post it all at once, but since this is my first screenplay, I want to iron out my deficiencies early on, so I can correct 35 pages of mistakes and know what I'm doing moving forward rather than needing massive rewrites over 100+ pages of content.

My biggest issues are that I know I am writing about something I personally am knowledgeable about, but the general public is not. So while all of this makes perfect sense to me, I worry that an uninitiated POV might be confused where I am not.

I had a lot of trouble formatting battle sequences, which cover multiple POVs over a large area, while cutting in-between them. I read the script for Troy yesterday and decided to go with that general idea for battle formatting, and I hope it paid off in the climax of this excerpt. That is also another reason I wanted to get this up early, because I have at least 2-3 more major battle sequences I need to write and I want to make sure they are making sense.

I'm a bit worried about character names, especially since my protagonist and his father share exactly the same name, which is annoying to write around.

I feel like my dialogue is fairly strong in the places I need it to be, but worry that I don't have enough of it.

I'm also curious if you guys think this script lives up to the minute-per-page idea, because I don't think this would last 35 minutes on screen, even if that is the number of pages written so far.

Also wondering how effective my introduction of Hannibal is. I rewrote this most recent draft so that his name is not mentioned whatsoever until he actually appears on screen for the first time, and I envision it as a kind of huge, awesome moment, but I'm not sure if it comes off that way, or if waiting so long to put a name to him is distracting at all.

Anyway I need to stop before this post grows longer than my script. I hope you guys enjoy it and any kind of feedback would be wonderful, good or bad.

It's my first one so I'm pretty excited about it, no matter how it ultimately turns out.

Cheers!

EDIT: Aaaand I totally messed up the link, because it isn't even a link. I'll try and get it fixed here real quick! Sorry!

EDIT 2: Works now!