https://writers.coverfly.com/projects/view/d725768c-6f8b-4094-9b6f-83afa40272ea/The_Midnight_Rose
12 page screenplay for CRWR 306 – Intermediate Writing for Screen. Quarterfinalist in the Final Draft – Big Break 2024 Competition.
Logline: A daring young woman masquerades as a flirtatious, male masked thief in the streets of Venice, though her heart is set on her best friend; but when her friend’s family-run bakery is at threat of closing down forever, she sets out on her most important heist yet.
This script is based on an old idea I had when I was younger, thinking it would be interesting to have the classic romantic masked rogue story while challenging gender roles with the thief being a woman disguising as a man. The script itself was workshopped over the course of the term with other peers several times- their feedback was useful in addressing what was the most difficult aspect of the screenplay, which was trimming the length down to 10-12 pages.
My outline had a lengthy 16 scenes in total, which certainly did not fit within the page limits when I wrote out the first rough draft. With each new iteration of the draft I cut down the page count, adhering to advice from my peers to remove the bloat in the introductory scenes so that the climax segments had room to breathe, since those scenes were the core of an action short such as this one. I removed entire scenes and characters from the script, condensing the dialogue to the necessary key points to keep the pace as tight as possible.
Looking back, I do believe this sort of plot would work best as a full-length film, but it was a rewarding challenge to create a snappy script that still contained all the action beats one would expect from the typical masked thief story. The script received compliments from my peers and teaching assistant for the strong visual work in the action scenes, able to clearly picture the scene unfolding, which is what I’d hoped for when designing this script.