The Black Hole

Silently and in three minutes this little short film delivers a single punch-line that is an end to the tale and it does it is a very enjoyable way. An office worker is busy doing pointless photocopying late at night and is clearly tired and fed up with the whole affair. When the copier produces a piece of paper with a black circle on it he finds that it somehow creates a void in any object he puts it against. So taking a chocolate bar out of the vending machine by creating a void in the glass is a given, but it takes mere seconds for his ambitions to be greater.

A simple morality tale this one but well delivered as a contained idea – get in, get out and satisfy the audience with the slightest of offerings. There is no dialogue here but it still works because the idea is simple and delivered well. I laughed at the end, although it did have a certain dramatic edge to it as well. A very simple short film but the idea is quickly developed and delivered which made it surprisingly satisfying and punchy.

Short films almost always carry some kind of moral. Usually short films pose a simple but rather important question and answer it. Even if it's a tiny cartoon, it almost always has a theory of common sense.

In this case, such rhetoric works one hundred percent. Choosing between the temptation of evil and the complexity of good, a tired office worker chooses a more convenient one after a working day. With the help of a sheet of paper printed from a printer with a magic black hole, he gets himself a "Snickers" from a vending machine with food and drinks, and then the requests become serious, which turns into a fatal outcome.

In three minutes, Philip Sansom and Ollie Williams showed the perniciousness of greed simply and because of this gracefully. It is not necessary to make whole films or TV series about this, because it is enough to draw a fairly clear metaphor and accurately reflect its consequences.

Watching this short film will not take much time, so I advise you to open this video on YouTube to think about the question: "Do you let your greed or not?"

Today we have a shortfilm called "The Black Hole", released in 2008 but I descovered it only one month ago. Everything happens inside an office during the night. The directors and writers of the short (Phil Sansom and Olly Williams) chose Napolen Ryan as the only character of the film, and it's wonderful to see how his face expresses all his thoughts. At this sci-fi story a worker makes photocopies at the machine but suddenly something happens, something weird. At the begining only a dull thing but at the end it becomes amazing and exciting. As far as I'm concerned, it's a great exercise to make a shortfilm when you are a cinema student because you need to create a completely meaningful creation in only three or five minutes. "The Black Hole" is a film that everybody must watch because it is very short and really thrilling. You want to play it again and again and maybe you will feel a little bit scared at the end.

The Black Hole is a fun Looney Tunes-inspired cautionary tale about a lowly office worker discovering a portable portal. The concept of the portal is familiar but at a brisk three-minutes filmmakers, Philip Sansom and Olly Williams, keep it tight and engaging. You'll see the end way before the protagonist does but that is part of the appeal.

Fans should check out the short film, Room 8.

'The Black Hole (2008)' looks like a mid-2000s advertisement for a chocolate bar, the sort of thing in which an unhappy office worker is given a specific brand of chocolate and his world goes from black-and-white to technicolour, as it were. In fact, this would've been a perfect ad for 'Snickers' if it finished a little earlier and had a "get some nuts!" tag at the end. Aesthetic aside, this is a really concise and confident short film about a man who discovers that the office printer may in fact not be of this world when it prints a magic black hole capable of bypassing any surface it is pressed up against. The thing is an example of the perils of greed, with an appropriately dark ending and a (subtly) satirically comical tone. It's an entertaining and intriguing experience that makes the most of its premise and doesn't outstay its welcome. 7/10.