The Lost Shadow - A Kylo Ren Story (by NinjaRen)

@NinjaRen wrote an interesting short screenplay (would probably be about 20 to 30 minutes long), and we ended up collaborating on it (I did script doctoring).
(This is being posted with NinjaRen's consent.)

CLICK LINK: THE LOST SHADOW - A KYLO REN STORY (PDF - Google Drive)


(Art by Ninjaren)

I didn't do a whole lot.
My goal when I do doctoring for others is always pretty much the same: to take what they've written and just tighten it up a bit more without changing the core points it was aiming to hit.

In this case, mostly that meant adjusting a few things to make the themes pop out more through the relationship dramas that NinjaRen had written.

I've been mostly sucked into other projects back to back, so I keep kind of spacing out on putting this one up, but I finally remembered!

It's an interesting story and idea.
I kind of like the idea of Star Wars having short stories like this that explore single character themes and a single relatively simple ontological concept. It's almost sort of a Star Trek swing at Star Wars in that it tries to shove everything into a 30 minute episode and tell a moral play in that limited time.

To do that, Ninja cleverly focused in on making the chasing of other force users down by Kylo a personal case of a fellow student from back at the academy (in this aspect, all I did was squeeze that lemon more and get more juice out of that clever idea).

We're also watching Kylo grow just a bit through his confrontational relationships with others.
Just a bit, just enough. It's a clever idea Ninja took of building a single point of character obstacle to work on that could be linked to the action.
That's a challenge to accomplish in a half hour story, but he was able to sketch out what that would look like and we worked on cinching that up and hitting even harder.

He also went ahead and dove into the exotic nature that Star Wars is capable of in interesting and colorful ways, given the limited timeline of the story.

Generally speaking, I'm not one for employing flashbacks, but Ninja was able to embrace the method and put it to full use in ways that are interesting. I'm not a convert yet, but I would say that in this instance, they work pretty well given the thematic focus and contextual realization the audience is supposed to have at different times.

Overall, there's a lot of novel concepts and character theme concepts that Ninja put in this story.
It's not a really long read, but it's an interesting one. One that feels like it belongs with Kylo's character without jarring anything in the films.

I believe Ninja's still looking for help on the production side of things (I believe he's aiming for creating an animated short).

If you're interested in taking part, contact him here via direct messaging.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I just realized the google drive link wasn't set to public viewing.

Sorry.
Fixed!

Cheers,
Jayson