Craig: Research: 'The Black Hole'

The film I have chosen to study is ‘The Black Hole’. This stood out for me when I first watched it as I felt it followed all of the forms of a comedy film, despite only being less than three minutes long. As with a lot of videos, it was found on the website ‘YouTube’ and teaches the importance of karma and greed.


The director of this film is Diamond Dugs (AKA Phil and Olly), who have worked together since 2003 and this film is officially a comedy. The film is commercial and was entered for the National Film Board of Canada festival, in association with the Cannes Film Festival and YouTube. This film was nominated for Best Film in 2009. Other places where it is available is the NFB website as well as returning over 800,000 results on search engine Google when ‘The Black Hole short film’ is entered as a search. It is not available anywhere on DVD. It was shown in festival and is currently only on the internet.

The synopsis is quite simple, a worker prints off what looks like a big black dot, however it is a hole which can allow him to fit through any surface he chooses to. He then decides to go into the company safe and take all the money, he puts his whole self inside by sticking it to the safe, however the paper falls off and he is stuck.

It is clearly a comedy simply by watching it the first time; the punch line is delayed in the film, however it does teach about karma, greed and risk-taking. It is slightly clichéd as well in the idea that bad things happen to bad people and so forth. The worker is the only character and this is emphasised through the editing and shot techniques such as loose framing and the distinct lack of close ups.

A suitable target audience for this film would probably be middle-aged males, as well as teenagers through how it is distributed, as a lot of them who work or worked in that sector could relate to the character, seeing the frustrating side of it as well as the humorous side on top of that.