Samuel Abrahams’ new film Offline Dating shows what happens when a guy asks girls he has just met out on a date

OFFLINE dating — remember that? A young guy took to the streets to ask girls out on a date, and his mate filmed the funny, sweet and occasionally cringe-making results.

Single guy road-tests ‘offline dating’

DEPENDING on your perspective, this short film is either a sweet take on old-school dating, or a searing reminder of why people turned to the online world to meet prospective partners in the first place.

British filmmaker Samuel Abrahams posted Offline Dating on Vimeo a week ago, depicting in a slick documentary style what happened when his single actor friend Tom decided to find a date in the real world, rather than via online apps such as Tinder.

Tom’s tall, fit and pleasant-looking — not what you would call intimidatingly handsome — and he approaches the task with gusto, approaching women in parks, on the street, while out jogging and even while behind the wheel of his car.

Awkward approach ... nobody would expect this attempt to be successful, and it wasn’t.

“I’m trying to find someone to go on a date with me and I didn’t want to do it in the online way,” he explains to one of the girls he meets.

He gets a lot of rejections, of course; some sweet, others pretty swift.

One girl offers advice on how he might have approached her differently, while another approach gets him exactly the wrong sort of response from a tough-looking guy.

Tom does make some headway in his dating attempts — but the particulars are best watched rather than described.

Abrahams told Vimeo that the project had its genesis in a discussion he had with actor mate Tom Greaves (the film’s star) “about the difference between the ‘us’ we present online and the ‘us’ that exists in real life.”

The film was shot in two days in a variety of locations around the London suburb of Hackney. Abrahams said it was just him and Tom on the first day of shooting, while on the second he used a couple of assistants. He said he was “amazed” at the positive responses he got from strangers while out filming.

... some were sweet and others were pretty swift.

Tom’s approach garnered a range of responses ...

“As a result of approaching strangers all weekend, we met so many kind, funny, open and generous people, who just like us, were all looking to enjoy the spontaneity of a real encounter, and possibly make a new connection,” he said.

But capturing the nuances of authentic interactions also presented its challenges.

Eyes wide open, arms closed ... Tom may not have been too sure about this one.

“I wanted to make something ... immediate and instinctive,” he told Vimeo. “My intention was to give the film a lot of energy, I wanted the camera to always be moving, pulling in and out of focus, which is a really tough thing to do when shooting observational material as you don’t want to miss that key moment, because you were looking at the wrong thing. The key, and this is something the first director I worked with taught me, you have to listen. It’s all about listening to what is happening, what they are saying, what they are not saying, and then quickly react and predict where the story is going, so you know how to cover the scene.”

Originally published as Samuel Abrahams’ new film Offline Dating shows what happens when a guy asks girls he has just met out on a date