Worries with the 'Car Slide' scene

Whilst creating our storyboard some thoughts arose about various problems we might face with our 'car slide' scene.

First is the fact that we want the failed slide to look as real as possible. The original idea was that we run fast into the side of the car at the wrong angle, and therefore fail the attempt and slowly slide off the front of the car, rather than the side, and fall to the floor. Although Sam, who will be playing the thief in our trailer, has kindly accepted for us to use his car for this scene, we cannot rule out the possibility that if we attempt this scene unprepared his car may become damaged in the process. We obviously do not want this and have thought of a few ways to try and reduce the chances of such an occurance:
- Study various scenes from films that use a car slide
- Slowly build up our speed, and use trial and error
- Practice this scene a lot at a safe speed beforehand
Hopefully these techniques will help keep the car, and more importantly us, from damage.

Secondly, we realised we needed a good reason for the car slide to even be attempted in the film. i.e, why not go around the car? We have therefore decided to make the car slide the only 'quick' option for the thief and the two policeman. We think that the best way to do this would be to make the front of the car as close as possible to the back of another car, making going inbetween slow and near impossible. For this however we would need two cars, and we would have to park them so close eachother that they may actually accidently bump into eachother when we set up the scene. Another method we have considered is having a wall in front of a car. Although this may be easier to organise, it would leave little room for us to fall in front of the car during the failed slide attempt. We therefore face the issue of leaving a small enough gap so it would be impractical to run through, but at the same time having the gap big enough so that we could fall off the front of the car.
We have decided that we will go out and practice this scene as soon as possible, to see whether the location will provide us with an answer, or whether it is possible for us to get the gap as we would like it.