The Black Hole

This movie is only three minutes long, but it is enough to describe man's greediness. I thought once again if you could get anything, you would continue to want.

A man is working in the office late at night and he has to copy many pieces of paper. A black hole is printed on one of them. He finds that he can get something through it. Then he decides to use that black hole to get the bills in the safe.

The story is simple and very easy to understand. Even so, the messages are certainly in it. Also, it is just funny. When I finished watching this short, I felt it is bad thing to want too much. However, if I were in the similar situation, I would do the same thing.

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.

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.

A man, using a copying machine, is presented with a large sheet of paper with a big, black spot on it. It turns out it is a transportable hole. One can place it on a wall and be able to reach through it. The potential is amazing, but we are greedy creatures, and sometimes we don't think before we act.

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: "Should you let your greed or not?"