Alone Time
Alone Time by Rod Blackhurst is a short film "based on a true story" about a woman who goes camping to get out of the city and when she gets her photos developed from the camping trip, photos are found on the camera of her asleep, despite her not seeing anyone else.
This tense, eye-widening thriller is a great example of how cinematography and set can instill an emotion in the viewer without any particularly obvious clues.
Rod Blackhurst
Rod Blackhurst is an award-winning director, known most notably for the Netflix Original documentary Amanda Knox. He has also worked on music videos and commercials, inspired by his well-traveled grandfather. He also has a second feature film, Here Alone, a post-apocalyptic thriller that won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at Tribeca Film Festival. He has a wide range of different work, all with great cinematography and putting full use to the term "show, don't tell". (Others can be found here).
The video
The video is based on a story written on a Reddit Forum, /r/nosleep. The film states in the beginning that it is based on a true story however after reading the story on the forum I believe it may be fictional, but there's no way of telling truly if it is something that actually happened.
However, the story is well-told, both by the original post and in the video. The use of the shots that put Ann (Rose Hemingway) in one side of the frame to show the background more builds tension as the viewer gets the sense that Ann is being followed, particularly after the 2 men depicted when she's in the city, the man on the subway (David Chokachi) and the man in the street (Jonathan Gundel) who both stand out, particularly as they follow her movements as she walks. However, as we don't see them again throughout the video, we are expecting to see them, and this builds the tension. They have also used this shot of Ann taking a photo of the lake she's camping by, with the camera moving from the side of her round to the back. This makes us feel like we are watching her from behind, as though we are following her, an almost voyeuristic shot to build the sense of something isn't quite right, heightened by the fact that Ann is kept in the centre of the frame. This makes it seem like we are looking through someone else's perspective rather than just watching a story.
We are made to feel this uneasiness right from the beginning, noticeable from the first shot of her waiting for a train. It's made to look as though we are watching her from a distance, from another platform maybe. Even the first shot of her at work builds a sense of dread as the camera slowly moves towards her. All of these different shots makes it more uncomfortable because the viewer doesn't know which one is the real threat, if any of them are, and this means they don't know what they're looking out for.
Another technique used to get a sense of emotion is the colour grading. Clearly seen in the examples I gave beforehand, when Ann is in the city it's a very grey-blue tone, making it seem dull, boring, and making it clear that this isn't a happy place for Ann. But as soon as she begins leaving the city, the shots are brighter, on sunnier days, and in the forest the shots are more colourful, she's wearing brighter clothing and less makeup which makes her look more youthful. Even her hair in the beginning is kind of messy and down around her shoulders, but when she leaves it's tied back in a high ponytail which shows her face more.
Character
Goal
In the beginning Ann seems quite hopeless and unhappy. But when she finds her sleeping bag, she gets the idea to go camping and so her goal becomes to try and relax and get work off of her mind. The viewer wants to mimic her emotions but we can't because we know more than her, we know that something bad is going to happen on the trip. This gives the viewer a goal, which is to find out what the threat to Ann is. The goal of the story overall is to continuously build tension, which it successfully does.
Conflict
Ann's conflict is how unhappy she is in the city. She wants to 'get away from it all' but feels constraints of her job. We are also given conflict from the 2 men in the city as we aren't sure if they are antagonists or not. We also get conflict from the ending as it's a cliffhanger and it's not revealed who actually took the photos.
Change
The change is the reveal of the photos. As the viewer we suddenly realise why we were made to feel so uneasy, and from Ann's point of view she now feels unsafe in her home. The final look to the camera gives the impression that Ann is looking at her stalker, as it's more of a jump- looking to something in front of her rather than a look of dread and realisation. However, we may never know.
How did it affect my work?
Alone Time is a good example of how the use of a camera can do the story telling. There isn't much dialogue in the script and I think if there had been, it would have been less dramatic, as it wouldn't have felt so alone (which once again adds to the tension). This is something I incorporated into my script when Connor is home alone. I wanted him to look paranoid, which would add to the tension. As we only filmed 2 minutes I wasn't able to include many of these scenes to show the paranoia but the dream and Connor checking out the window I hope will have given the right impression. As I've watched this after my production of the 2 minutes it's given me ideas that could have made mine a lot better, but now I know for the future a better way of building tension just with the use of camera techniques.
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