1. The Writer
Tilly is an author in the middle of an adventure novel where her heroine gets captured by the bad guys and tied up and gagged. Tilly always likes to write about what she knows, a writer's axiom, and is concerned that she has no experience at all as to what being tied up and unable to escape feels like. She decides to visit a friend with a purse full of rope and ask him to tie her up as tightly as he can so that she can sample the experience first hand. Her friend seems quite happy to help her out, Tilly lies there helpless on the floor, and she asks her friend to let her go now since she feels she has attained sufficient familiarity with being bound. However, her friend decides that, for complete authenticity, she should really stay in the ropes for several hours.

2. Watch Tilly Being Tied Up
We challenged Tilly to allow herself to be tied up to see if she could escape. She confidently accepted the challenge, convinced that she would be able to free herself, despite her experience in The Writer. Dave spent almost a quarter of an hour securing Tilly to the chair before gagging her and saying that the clock is now ticking. Why does the time matter? Simple: Tilly was warned that if she could not get free in under ten minutes then more rope would be added. She still didn't seem disconcerted by this news, at least not until she started trying to work her wrists loose. We watch Tilly in almost uninterrupted real time as she works on the ropes holding her, making a little progress on ropes that are not really critical - well, to be fair, these were the only ones she could reach. At the end of the ten minutes it was necessary to apply a little more rope, so Dave elected to add an elbow tie, restricting Tilly's range of motion even more. She refused to give up and continued working on the ropes. Does she succeed in getting free in the end?

54 minutes 06 seconds - 1920x1080 pixels - MP4: 2,534.9 MB