My films have screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight, Lincoln Center’s Art of The Real, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Visions du Réel and others. I’ve worked as a cinematographer internationally, including the US, Brazil, China, the South Pacific, Europe and Central Africa, and have contributed to Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentaries. I work as an editor, graphics artist and sound designer on films and installations.
THIS DECK IS PRIVATE: IF YOU ARE SEEING IT, YOU ARE BEING CONSIDERED TO COLLABORATE. THE CAST & CREW ARE UNCONFIRMED, NO ONE DEPICTED IS ATTACHED. PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS LINK. XOXO © MMXXVI ALEX TYSON
Hoping to save their relationship, two travel vloggers take an experimental drug with a strange couple on a volcano in the Mojave Desert.
As the hikers lose their inhibitions, military contractors surveilling them struggle to keep their distance.
Experimental narrative, surveillance satire, psychosexual tragicomedy
TONE
The Conversation meets Sideways, filtered through military bureaucracy and desert absurdity
CONSTRAINTS
Four days, one location. Long-lens staging, actors as B-Cam operators.
CHARACTERS
THE SEEKERS
Playful pranksters. Unhurried, unexplained, already free in the way THE NORMIES are straining to perform. Gen Z, but somehow ancient. They're the surprise.
THE SPIES
Contractors testing a lip-reading surveillance system on unsuspecting civilians. One is an intelligence officer turned AI developer, the other is a cynical Pro baseball camera operator. Together, they mistake ambiguity for intelligence.
THE NORMIES
High-strung content creators. Millennials. Their language is logistics. They live out of a luxury Sprinter van, making “desert content” to look free while their relationship falls apart. Matt brought an engagement ring. Claire feels trapped. They’re in for a surprise.
High-strung content creators. Millennials. Their language is logistics. They live out of a luxury Sprinter van, making “desert content” to look free while their relationship falls apart. Matt brought an engagement ring. Claire feels trapped. They’re in for a surprise.
THE SEEKERS
Playful pranksters. Unhurried, unexplained, already free in the way THE NORMIES are straining to perform. Gen Z, but somehow ancient. They're the surprise.
THE SPIES
Contractors testing a lip-reading surveillance system on unsuspecting civilians. One is an intelligence officer turned AI developer, the other is a cynical Pro baseball camera operator. Together, they mistake ambiguity for intelligence.
THE SET
The park is a natural 360º set: one trail in, one trail out. Wind gusts are constant, as are heat shimmer and mirages — ideal conditions for surveillance contractors to test their software on unsuspecting civilians at long range.
SYNOPSIS
The SEEKERS offer the uptight strangers a designer empathogen. Everyone takes it.
A mile off, two military contractors are field-testing CHORUS, a long-range surveillance system built to read lips and predict human behavior. But its algorithm is confidently wrong. As it follows the hikers, it hallucinates — turning a flirtation into "emotional subversion," a panic attack into "pre-kinetic combat breathing."
As THE SPIES try to tune the prediction software, they fall for their subjects and start watching them like reality TV.
The sun gets lower, trains pass and drag new colors into frame. As the drugs peak, the two couples stop being two couples. Egos dissolve, confessions spill out. They press each other's buttons, then start unbuttoning them. On the feed, the hikers come undone — four bounding boxes drift into two, then one.
Night falls. As relationships realign above ground and hidden identities emerge, CHORUS is the film's last reliable narrator. Its batteries deplete and the drones begin to fall. Is the volcano awakening?
THEMES
How far would you go with people you just met?
Can a machine see pain, ecstasy, madness?
What would you confess to a stranger you'll never see again?
If someone watched you for five hours, what would they get wrong?
THE CHAOS ELEMENT
THE SEEKERS bring TELOMERE, an experimental designer drug from Europe. They have enough for 4 doses, and the chance run-in with the NORMIES is a perfect opportunity to share.
TELOMERE is a truth serum in the form of an orange powder. It starts working in 20 minutes and lasts 6 hours. It delivers a heart-opening, ego-dissolving high resembling ecstasy, but with exaggerated empathogenic effects.
TELOMERE is a truth serum in the form of an orange powder. It starts working in 20 minutes and lasts 6 hours. It delivers a heart-opening, ego-dissolving high resembling ecstasy, but with exaggerated empathogenic effects.
THE SYSTEM
2 extreme telephoto lenses and 6 micro-drones stream a live feed of the hikers to a remote computer, allowing THE SPIES to eavesdrop in real time.
An AI generates speech from lip movements and conversational context — like autocorrect, from a mile away. At first, it’s catastrophically unreliable, but as it watches its subjects, it gains accuracy to an alarming degree.