Write Your Own Action Scene...

[triadruid]

Setting: Six-lane divided highway, at normal speeds (assume 65mph/105kph, to minimize regional bias). Protagonist is driving a taxicab in the middle lane. Antagonist is driving a smaller (30-seat or so) school bus in the right-hand lane. Any other occupancy of the bus is up to you to determine.

Requirements: Protagonist must stop or disable the bus, but may only use the taxicab or themselves as a weapon (no firearms for shooting out tires, no swords/adamantium claws to remove the rear axle). Property damage, shooting/SFX budget, and collateral civilian injury are NOT restricted.

For the movie version: Who is your director? Who is your protagonist actor? Does the choice of actor directly influence the effectiveness of the method you chose (i.e. Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris)?

GO!

Comments

[auraseer.livejournal.com]

What's my motivation? ;)

If I need to quickly stop the bus from activating a pressure plate for some End Of The World device, the action scene will be a lot different than if I'm just trying to capture the bank robber at the wheel.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Up to you (you're the screenwriter, not the actor).

[lexpendragon.livejournal.com]

Method: A lot of honking and waving of arms and yelling out the window.

Actor: Fran Kranz

Director: Tom Shadyac

Effictivity is defendant on plot.

How d'ya like these?

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

1) John McTiernan directing, Bruce Willis is driving the cab. The bus contains seventeen members of an international arms cartel. Willis' character has a headache and a sprained ankle. He keeps up with the bus, dodging gunfire from its occupants, until the highway crosses a bridge, at which point, he runs the taxicab into the back end of the bus, wedging the hood under the bus' rear axle, lifting the rear wheels of the bus several inches from the pavement. He then throws the cab's emergency brake, and locks the steering column into a hard left. The bus, which is apparently rear-wheel drive, fishtails, and then careens towards the side of the bridge. As the bus breaks through the guardrails, Willis leaps from the taxicab, and rolls onto his sprained ankle. He swears. The bus teeters perilously over the edge, but remains on the roadway. A police car, which has been pursuing Willis' taxicab, screams up, notices too late the impending doom, and crashes into the taxicab, sending both cab and bus down to the river below.

2) Guillermo del Toro directing, Rupert Everett is driving the cab. The bus contains a mysterious artifact which will inevitably lead to the destruction of the human race as we know it. The cab driver is running out of gas. As he sputters along, a great despair grips him. He knows he cannot succeed. He utters a prayer in an unknown tongue, a prayer taught to him by his grandfather, and passed down through the ages in his family. From ahead, we hear a great tearing sound. The driver looks up to see that a mysterious glowing rent has opened in the road in front of the bus. It is filled with shapes and colors that the mind's eye cannot comprehend. A mighty claw reaches forth and grabs the bus, pulling into the rip in the universe. As the cab driver stares uncomprehending ahead, the tear mends itself before his eyes.

3) David Lynch directing, a beautiful and mysterious blond woman is driving the cab. She is hidden behind large sunglasses and a kerchief. The bus is full of third-graders on their way to a science museum field trip. The cab has followed the bus since it left the school that morning. Suddenly, the cab accelerates, pulling up alongside the bus. The driver takes off her sunglasses, and turns to face the driver of the bus. He stares at her. His jaw drops. The scene dissolves into an apparently unrelated flashback involving a midget, a huge black book, and a prisoner french-kissing a horse. The bus stops.

Re: How d'ya like these?

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

#3 made me laugh out loud!

Also, PIT maneuver is the thing I was trying to think of this morning.

Re: How d'ya like these?

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I learned something! Today is not a total waste!

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Actors: Kelly Hu (driving the cab), Ali Larter (driving the bus)
Director: Robert Rodriguez

In the bus is a little boy who is a cyborg and the living key to the most powerful world-wide computer system ever made. (Think Cerebro only cooler.) Ali Larter represents the evil organization out to use him and Kelly Hu is his cyborg handler out to get him back. The boy sits in quietly in the bus, fidling with a red rubber ball.

Kelly gets as close alongside the bus as she can, then extrudes part of the nanite AI inside her body through her left wrist and onto the steering wheel, anchoring part of it to the accelerator. Climbing out the driver's side window, she takes a moment to get her balance, then vaults, catching hold of the bus's STOP sign, swinging it out and using the carbide impact stud on the heel of her black leather high-heeled boot to shatter the bus's window. After smoothly vaulting inside, she and Ali engage in melee after Ali anchor's the bus's wheel and accelerator via a similar nanite mechanism.

The bus and cab veer into a construction zone, onto an uncompleted ramp as they always do. While on the receiving end of a beatdown, Kelly communicates with her nanites to accelerate the cab, which veers in front of the bus and is crumpled underneath. The sudden impact causes the bus to flip end over end through the air and land precariously balanced on the end of the unfinished ramp. After a few tense moments where the ongoing brawl ranges from one end of the bus to the other, (causing the bus to teeter in the process,) eventually Kelly stuns Ali, grabs the boy and backflips out the bus's back door. As a bloodied Ali looks up she sees her opponent grinning at her, holding the boy in her arm and brandishing the red rubber ball in her hand. She tosses it and after a few dramatic bounces, it comes to rest at the front of the bus's cab, adding just enough weight to send the bus toppling. Ali roles her eyes and mutters a pithy "oh sh--" just before falling to her fiery demise.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

*applauds* The Asian fanboys will eat it up!