Driving The Relm by Leäf Sensnør Fjörd - Short, Horror - The new owner of the latest self-driving car gets the ride of his life. Literally! 12 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

I liked a lot of this...

But I have some qualms.

I do love me some Driverless-Car fiction. A certain SS member (who shall remain nameless at this point) did this very well in another OWC

I think you’d better go over the
procedures once more with me.

Hmm, not the most subtle of exposition, is it? I wonder if you could segue into that a bit better.

You're going to kick yourself for this: lightening
Or maybe you think that's how it's spelled?  Uh-uh. It's: Lightning.

No need for: IS SEEN & ARE SEEN. No idea why the CAPS either.
The repetitive use of 'frozen' is a bit, well, just not the right word to use for windows and doors that won't budge, given they're not literally frozen. Perhaps I'm being too pedantic.

No need for exclamation points at the end of long sentences e.g. :if the weather clears!
a large great white shark  ( no need for 'large') - it is what it is by the 'great' tag, imho.
Punctuation missing - e.g. 'Lets see'

Okay, you were probably under the gun so I'll quit the nitty-gritty.

Very entertaining to a point.

You handled the suspense pretty well. A horrific and inventive scenario for sure though I would have preferred we stayed on the road. You risk it becoming a little over the top, (comedic) and far fetched once we entered a different 'realm'. :)

P.S. What's in a name.
Your moniker sure is a mouthful. :)
And speaking of mouthfuls, how big was that car?

So, for starters, it appears you missed the page limit, but in reality, you were just too lazy to delete the 13th blank page.  Not a good start...and we haven't even started yet.

Wow...first 3 pages completely talking heads exposition.  Dialogue not good.  Nothing here feels remotely realistic.

No reason for DISSOLVE

Page 4 - Why is the jazz music OS, if this is an INT scene?

is seen, are seen...both not good.  Writing is very poor.

15 minutes later in the Slug?  Really?  Oh man...I think I'll just try and finish and stop with the notes.

Oh man.  Really not even sure what to say here.  I'm actually wondering if this is a pisser?  Story and action is completely redonkulous.  Nothing is remotely believable here.

Sorry, but this is really poor.

*

Three full pages on how the car works is way too many, IMO.

Would have liked a catalyst - why did he decide to buy that particular car?

The ending was pretty predictable so it lost a bit of suspense for me.

Congrats on entering.

Quoted from eldave1 The ending was pretty predictable so it lost a bit of suspense for me.

Predictable?  Dave, did you read to the end?  If you did, I find it absolutely amazing that you had predicted such an ending.  It's so completely crazy and out of left field, how could anyone predict this?

I'm seriously shocked and just need to know.

Hi writer,

Did you really pay to register a OWC script?

The first 3 pages a quite a slog. I think this needs to be condensed to important info only.

Quoted Text EXT. MONTEREY - PACIFIC COAST HWY - 15 MINUTES LATER - NIGHT

If this 15 minute time gap is of any actual importance it would be better written as a SUPER.

I don't like the bold text personally. It adds nothing and only serves to pull me out of the read. The same can be said for all the caps, especially in the dialogue.

This is all over the place.

Quoted Text DONOVAN A car -- swallowed by a whale? Isn’t that a little far fetched, Ensign? NASH Not at all, Commander. I’m thinking it’s a blue whale. Largest mammal on earth. At a hundred feet long and two hundred tons in weight--? It’s entirely possible. And would explain the movement out to sea.

A very good example of on the nose dialogue.

From driver-less car to 20 000 leagues under the sea.

Just way too much going on here, especially towards the end.

Not for me unfortunately.

All the best.

"the better it knows your habits" What habits? The car is self-driving. Does it learn how you drink your coffee? Odd choice. We'll see if it makes sense later.

No need to say: ARE SEEN.

"is brightly lit" Maybe: The instrument panel glows brightly.

15 minutes later. That's specific.

Never seen a FADE UP before. Keep it simple and FADE IN.

Okay. Done. Weird twist at the end with the whale. Didn't like that choice at all.

I did like the premise. With a world on the verge of mass numbers of self-driving cars, I think there's some ground to explore here. So, that was a good choice.

However, I didn't like any of the other choices. I'd love to see you explore other ways that the automated vehicle could imperil our guy. X FILES had a quirky episode about an automated world gone rogue. You could watch that for inspiration.

I'd suggest cleaning the script up a bit and explore other more clever obstacles. With some changes, this could be fun.

Best,
Paul

Oh, and don't bother registering a short. Save your money. It's automatically copyrighted as soon as you put words on the page anyway. Save that for pilots and features. Besides, no ones gonna steal it... and if they do... shame on them.

Psst...you aren't supposed to out yourself, it's still anonymous until after the voting.

I think the opening exposition has been shot down enough. It's unnecessary, just get to the action.

The drive itself was well done. The storm coming was nice foreshadowing. But why did he choose to go to the rest stop? Was it to wait out the storm? He didn't, so I'm confused about that.

Lightning and AI. Nothing ever goes wrong there. Good idea bringing it in here, it works. And the car suddenly turning back on, unresponsive, speeding faster and faster...that was great. Excellent job.

And that's where it should have ended. With him flying off a cliff. Maybe not the line "Not like this" though.

Instead, you took this right off the rails. The AI that suddenly can carry on full conversations. A car that keeps the water out really, really well. Totally unexpected visuals, until the explanation comes and how exactly does the coast guard know it's a whale? And, what??? Why would a whale even bother with the car that's been sitting on the bottom of the ocean?

You took it way too far. Start with him getting the car, cut to the driving, give us the lightning causing the AI to kill him, and it's a lovely cautionary tale.

Good job entering!

Quoted from Dreamscale Predictable?  Dave, did you read to the end?  If you did, I find it absolutely amazing that you had predicted such an ending.  It's so completely crazy and out of left field, how could anyone predict this? I'm seriously shocked and just need to know.

John, an atheist, buys a driver less car. He's worried about what happens if it malfunctions. He is reassured that only an Act of God would cause any problems.

At this point I knew that the car would malfunction and it would be due to an Act of God - which in fact it did (lightening) and the Atheist met his demise.

i.e., the ending was predictable and forecast in the beginning.

PM me if you have any more questions in this regard. I don't want to hijack this writer's thread on a debate.

As pointed out, there are some interesting formatting choices but I'm flexible so let's SEE what the story has to offer.

Well written tale in the main and I'm a sucker for a script that uses new technology in interesting ways.

I was worried you might have lucked onto one of my AI car ideas but fortunately not ;-)

What stopped me really liking this was the ending and the whale, I just got Pinochio in my head!

Decent effort.

Three pages of dialogue just to tell us about an automatic car. Have a think, is there a way you can start later without telling the audience so much?

Then we get a page of Harold just driving. You need to get the action sooner or come up with some way to make this either entertaining or suspenseful to keep the audience engaged.

This reads more like a suspense thriller to me. There’s no horror. A car malfunctions and ends up underwater, the passenger survives for a while but drowns. This would have been a horror if the A.I. deliberately killed the guy but it tried to save him.

The A.I. along with the technology in the car and the coastguard sections did not sound authentic. A bit of research goes a long way.

There’s a lot of potential here but you just haven’t managed to do it justice yet. I’d keep at it though.

My advice is to start late with Harold driving and interacting with VAC from the start. Have VAC behaving a little off. As time goes by VAC learns about Harold and grows to dislike him. VAC makes life difficult, a test of wills ensues.  These escalate until VAC comes to the conclusion that Harold must die but it makes it seem like an accident, like it is something that Harold did wrong. You end then with the knowledge that this incident is blamed on the human, and there’s loads of death traps out there just waiting to happen.

Hi,

I really don't know how I feel about this. I don't know if I liked it. It was definitely strange, oddly written and the ending was a bit crazy. But, if I was watching this I think I'd kind of be into it.

Interesting.

Good luck.

Funny! However, there are over two pages of dialogue describing the car's controls, and I don't think too many readers would mind if you cut that down a little. I really enjoyed this story.

Hello writer

Looking at the title, at first I thought you had misspelled realm - glad to see I was wrong lol

A lot of explanation up front - a slow start and, sorry to say, bored me a little. I can't imagine watching that and getting excited about what's to come.

How can the car learn his habits if he's not driving it? Unless he meant for Harold to manually take over and drive the car around town for a bit? even so, how will it benefit the AI to know Harold's driving habits? surely the car will be programmed to drive safely and economically anyway.

Quoted Text Harold leafs through a magazine as it begins to sprinkle.

That doesn't read right, I was wondering how a magazine would sprinkle.

There's a lot of thunder and lightning in these entries - is it a prerequisite that horror must contain bad weather?

"IS SEEN/ ARE SEEN" - don't need these, it's a movie - we assume everything you tell us is seen. Plus, you can't see thunder.

Quoted Text HAROLD This is nonsense! A brand new car?

This is not needed, we know its a brand new car.

Harold is bothering me, he seems very calm that lightning has just struck his car - I just watched some videos of lightning hitting moving cars - it looks loud and scary as hell, smoke and sparks - this didn't really come across in the script and Harold isn't reacting as I would expect.

Quoted Text HAROLD (CONT’D) Finally! This car is dangerous!

These little lines to himself feel unnatural

VAC is a seriously sophisticated AI - but speaks like a human "An hour or two, maybe longer" - I would expect AI to speak in more certainties but that could just be my preconception.

Quoted Text GREEN We could send down the divers? Car was equipped with a specially made location beacon like on planes.

How does he know this if it was a witness that called it in?

Very exposition heavy dialogue between the divers - it's also a terrible way to reveal this information to us - the twist should be shown to us, not told to us.

I also don't buy that a whale would eat a car - way too far-fetched for me. For 1, he crashes by the coast - I can't imagine a blue whale feeding close enough to the coast to pick up the car. and dead fish and a body? Whales eat tiny food, krill and plankton - If a blue whale picked up anything the size of a car, it would get crushed against it's palate and deffo wouldn't be able to swallow.

unless this is some kind of horror land whale - but there is no indication of it. I think you took this is the wrong direction personally.

Well done on entering

Matt

DRIVING THE RELM

Christine meets Moby Dick. This one isn't written badly and the story is OK. Memorable perhaps for its mash-up of those two stories.

We open with 3 pages of dialogue. Didn't he just buy the car, yet he's acting like he's never even sat in it? Anyway, the story gets going around page 5. Personally, I would've just started the whole thing with the warning alerts.

This was quite imaginative but I didn't find anything horror about it. If it was trimmed down and you lost some of that dialogue it would be a fun piece.

I won't piggyback off others'.  The biggest issue I had, and I say this humbly, was I felt... at times... like the characters were talking to me and not to one another. They were explaining things to one another that presumably the other would already know. I get that we (the audience) need to know these things, I just feel there might be a subtler way of exposing them.

Overall, it was a decent effort. -Andrea.

Logline would be soooo much better if you deleted 'Literally!'.

Quite a few 'is seen' and 'is heard' that is unnecessary: e.g. Jazz is on the radio; Lightning and thunder.

Pg. 7 Fade to Black. OH! There's more! I thought that was the end....

Well, that was interesting and unexpected. An extra blank page for good measure. Can't say I'm a big fan of this one. The time span in the slugs wouldn't be conveyed to a viewer unless written a Super. Some spelling issues too (lightening).

Good job entering, writer.