Clip description
You can watch The Instructional Guide to Dating here in its entirety. An air hostess (Lara Cox, voice-over by Avigail Herman) gives an in-flight safety demonstration of ten instructional ‘steps’ to dating. Each dating ‘destination’ is displayed on an animated departure board, followed by a series of instruction cards and accompanied by lounge music.
Curator’s notes
The inventive combination of live action, pixellation, cut-out animation and diagrams lends great amusement and clarity to The Instructional Guide to Dating. For example, when gentlemen are cautioned against having their gaze loiter around the breast area, a dotted line animates from the eye of a pixellated man directly to a diagram of a woman and her brassiere.
The entire action is framed by a television screen of the 1950s, in keeping with the style of the film. The lovely irony of this student film is that it deals with the content from a contemporary perspective. By presenting dating instruction via an air hostess issuing in-flight safety instructions before take-off, the humour is sharp and effective: dating can be dangerous and you need to follow some guidelines to navigate it successfully.
