Ben Vallack's Pass Her By explores atmosphere, mystery and loneliness

Exeter-based filmmaker Ben Vallack‘s latest short is an atmospheric, and mysterious looks at loneliness and imagination. He told D+CFilm about how the story developed.

Pass Her By – Short Film from Ben Vallack on Vimeo.

The story was initially conceived after a phone call with my parents, who live in a house which is surrounded by vast Forestry Commission woodland. We started thinking about making a short about a unknown homeless character entering the property from the forest. The short would be about the initial conflict between the intimidating trespasser and the apparently vulnerable housewife.

As conversations about the story developed, between myself and a good friend of mine Tom Bates, who has very creative story writing abilities, the character of the house-wife started to develop. She would be in a rather lonely relationship, whose husband left early for work each morning, and she would be left to tend to the house by herself each day. This opened up the potential for the trespasser to fill a need for a new person in her life, after the initial confrontation.

It was then that I realised the trespasser could actually have been created by the house-wife, as a figment of her imagination, as a result of this loneliness and the absence of her husband.

I decided to tell the story as if the trespasser is a real character for the main part, and introduce the idea that he is a figment of the house-wife’s imagination as a twist in the final shot.

I shot the film on location at my parent’s house in Ross-on-Wye. It was by a happy coincidence that it snowed just before our scheduled shoot, which luckily didn’t melt too much over the course of filming! The characters are played by my parents, Paul and Jenny Vallack. Paul in fact plays two characters, the ‘invisible’ husband, as well as the trespasser.

I used a Sony EX3 with stock lens along with a Glidetrack and B-Hague jib. I edited in Final Cut Pro, audio mix in Soundtrack, and colour correction in Apple Color.

• Find out more about Ben Vallack’s work on his website.