#No escape room trial
#No escape room series

Each one was rigged to simulate how Parkinson’s symptoms – such as loss of memory, physical tremors, stiffness, confusion, difficulty multi-tasking and blurred vision – impact a person’s ability to complete everyday movements and tasks.

#No escape room series

Taking three days to construct, including building multiple hidden cameras into the structure, the room was designed to help participants understand Parkinson’s symptoms through a series of puzzles inspired by everyday tasks such as tying a shoelace, pouring tea and using a computer mouse. What the participants didn’t know was that they were taking part in an experiment to dramatise the everyday challenges of people living with Parkinson’s.

#No escape room trial

The one-of-a-kind experience, created by Wunderman Thompson Australia and Airbag, started with a callout via Facebook to Australia’s biggest escape room enthusiasts, with the opportunity to be the first people to trial a new escape room. The best advice for getting out of this “Room” is don’t ever go in it.With five Australians under 40 diagnosed with Parkinson’s every day, Parkinson’s NSW has launched the first-ever ‘No Escape Room’ to simulate what life is like for people living with the disease. There’s a preview “movie” on 8mm celluloid that is properly surreal and creepy.īut the clues are more interesting than the deaths or near-death-experiences, the characters as thinly developed as they often are in such genre pictures and the resolution has a fillip meant to make us forget how drab and lifeless most of what preceded it was. The lighting and set design and decor are striking. And then weird stuff, seeing and hearing “echoes” of themselves in mid-escape, in future escape, in their death throes or what have you throws them off. They surrender their phones and set off on their hour-long quest to “free” five people who “disappeared” in the clutches of “The Inventor” long ago. “So is that a clue, or just really good ‘atmosphere?'” Kathryn Davis plays the escape room nerd, the one who keeps saying “You guys are new to this” and who refuses to take what they find themselves going through at face value, all “part of the show.” Hamza Haq is her disinterested boyfriend and Dennis Andres plays the wild card, the guy who jokingly calls himself “a plant, part of the show,” but who isn’t. Horseback riding is out, a car breakdown leaves them in a small town which has a garage, a diner and apparently, an “escape room” in a Tudor style mansion outside the town limits. The story? Disinterested, lip-glossed/phone-distracted teen ( Jeni Ross) takes a day trip to the country with Dad ( Mark Ghanimé). On a tiny budget with a tight schedule, as Hitchcock preached, a detailed shot-by-shot storyboard can ensure you get what you need for the editor to make your thriller just fly by.

Pre-planning is a must for any shooting script.

“No Escape Room” probably went wrong in the storyboard process.

Pedestrian shot selection and editing finish off any sense of “urgency” that the story is meant to generate. Put more effort in the clues and clever ways designed to solve them (numbers written on the whirling blades of a ceiling fan, only decipherable is you can figure out what in the room might give you a strobe effect) than you do to pacing. Pay more attention to the sets in wide shot than the imperiled characters in unnerving close-ups.

The best ways to botch that are failing to keep the cast’s energy up, set-up to set-up, letting them slow-walk something that by definition and design is a fast-paced “ticking clock” thriller. The puzzle-it-out clues are challenging as all get out and the house’s clockwork trapdoors, hollow walls and hidden recesses are given a workout.īut something supernatural starts to happen and…there IS no ESCAPE! “No Escape Room,” the latest horror riff on the “escape room from Hell” theme, has the building blocks of a solid genre thriller.įive people undertake a mysterious small town escape room experience.