The Floor is Lava by Joshua Sommersby - Short, Black Comedy - Three actors must act their way to a safe place when the floor of the room they're in turns into make-belief lava. 12 pages - pdf, format 8)

Oh nice job. I really like this. One thing that is cumbersome is reading the #1, #2, #3 character names...and I think even the writer got confused because it's Actor #3 that dies first but then he's suddenly in Actor #2's place... other than that, this script was really cool. I would have liked to see something more at the ending..some sort of twist.... like they weren't really dead or something. Maybe they give Actor #1 the part because he really overcame the obstacles with his reactions...but he quits after being put through the shit!

Really nice job that kept me reading here.

Joshua,

some notes.

A good job of blocking out an action sequence.  It shows imagination.  That's all make believe works too as you show the set being used.

My problem comes with the lava.  Lave comes in anywhere from 1200 to 2200 degrees F.  At that temp, the wooden chairs and table and couch would go up immediately.  Everything would be on fire.  Worse, since it's molten rock, it would spew all kinds of gases which would combine with the gases of the couch and walls, etc.  The environment would turn toxic in a heartbeat.  

Of course, you can probably count on the audience not knowing that.

So, I like the job you've done, although the ending is a a bit predictable.  And there really isn't much of a story because there's little conflict between the actors.  And at 2000 degrees, oven mitts would probably be a waste of time.  

best
Richard

Pale Yellow,

Many thanks for reading, and many many thanks for making the mental effort to compensate for my mistake and read it to the end!

There's a new version here that has the correct cue-lines:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3FgBYschJXbSGZtb0hwdVdaelE/view?usp=sharing

RichardR,

thank you for reading as well. The lava floor is, as you noticed, very inaccurately displayed. "The floor is lava" is actually the name of a children's game, and in that game chairs and sofas and such can be considered made of non-flammable materials. I had considered making the lava more true to life as well, since the story is an extreme version of the children's game, but I felt that making it more scientifically accurate might distract from the characters and make an already fairly challenging short even more complicated to produce.

As far as the ending goes. There could be a lot of different endings. I chose for a deadpan, play-it-straight-until-fade-out version, but I can easily see how someone might prefer a version that falls back on it all happening on a set, maybe something like the second actor calling out a foul because of the oven mitts, and the first actor saying something like "Nuh uh, they're fireproof. It says so on the label. And besides you're dead! You can't talk." and then the director cutting in to arbitrate on a childish argument, taking everything back to the initial sound studio framing device and the children's game premise.

And as far as the ending goes, it might be worth mentioning that "The Floor is Lava" is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which means that if you don't like the ending, you can simply change it and produce your own version instead. You don't need my permission to do that,or even let me know you did it.