Kit Parry 10802 NEA Evaluation

The Academy's definition of a short film sets its

running time at 60 minutes or less, and
encompassing a wide range of styles and genres,
and animation. Despite this, there is no single,
definitive criterion for what constitutes a short
film. Nevertheless, the overarching goal is
typically to evoke emotion or stimulate thought,
while also exploring themes of cinematic artistry
and sharing insights from potentially
contemporary or historical perspectives.
The Arrival, a short film directed Daniel Montanarini, depicts a woman in a moral dilemma
over whether or not she should have an
abortion, with the woman’s character
developing from an unsure state of mind, to a
clearly decided one. Tight Jeans on the other
hand, a film directed by Destiny Ekaragha,
delves in racial dynamics, while staying very
much in the region of comedy, as it centres
around a conversation between three young
men. My film, The Call of the Void, attempts to
encompass both aspects, in that it is a short film about a young man’s deteriorating mental
health about an obsession with death, while also having a subtle, underlying contemporary
perspective, as it involves mental health struggles and suicidal themes, something very
much at the forefront of present-day life.

In The Call of the Void, we follow the story of

Judd, a young man, who has clear depressive
episodes and suicidal tendencies, and how he
struggles to cope with these thoughts, due to
his obsession with a human impulse known as
‘the call of the void’, which causes human
curiosity surrounding death to lead to commit
drastic measures in their search for an answer
about what happens after we die. Judd’s
depressive thoughts escalate further and further as the film progresses, eventually causing
his suicide at the end of the film, after being driven
insane by the call of the void. This similarly
matches Echo, a short film directed by Lewis
Arnold, as the main protagonist suffers similar
emotional turmoil surrounding her dead parent,
which Judd does in The Call of the Void, as his dead
mother is a source for his depressive thoughts. As
for the title of my film, I wanted to keep it simple,
by naming it after what the film centres around,
and also has a sense of ambiguity as not many
 Kit Parry 10802 NEA Evaluation

people are aware of what ‘the call of the void’ actually is, and so the title intrigues them into
finding out what it is by watching the film.

The BFI defines genre as a category of artistic

composition, characterised by similarities in form,
style, or subject matter. The genre of my film, The Call
of the Void, is a psychological or suspense thriller, as it
features themes of insanity, death and psychological
torment. Directed by Dan Sully, The Ellington Kid is a
film with psychological thriller aspects, especially the
ending, where there is a series of small twists,
concerning a story about a young man being killed and then turned into food that is served
into customers. The man reveals this to be a joke to his friend, but the final shot of the final
shows the shop owner sharpening knives and looking menacingly at the men, leaving the
viewer uncertain of what will happen to them and if they will end up the way the boy in the
story did. Similarly in my film, there is an ambiguous ending as after we see the protagonist,
Judd, jump off the cliff, the viewer is left unsure
about the future of Judd’s brother, Nicholas, who
tries to stop him committing suicide, but
ultimately fails and so is left with no more family
members. I also managed to solidify my film as a
psychological thriller through the use of original
music, similar to that of the music used in the
shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho,
helping to heighten the suspense of several of
the scenes.

In the cinematography of my film, I wanted to start and end the film with a similar mid shot
of Judd and then Nicholas overlooking the film, similar to films like Sam Mendes’ 1917
(2019) or David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014), both of which begin and end with similar shots.

Another
aspect of the

The opening and closing shots of The The opening and closing shots of The opening and closing shots of
Call of the Void symbolise its’ cyclic 1917 symbolise the film Gone Girl emphasise how Nick is
nature and how Nicholas may go depicting one small event in a never able to escape his
down the same path as Judd. much larger situation. psychotic wife.
Kit Parry 10802 NEA Evaluation

cinematography that I used to highlight Judd’s insanity, was the use of Dutch angles in the
café sequence, where I shot Judd in increasingly more canted Dutch angles as the sequence
progressed, to demonstrate Judd leaning further and further into insanity due to his
obsession with death and grief for his mother. For these shots I took inspiration from a
particular shot in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, where we see Leo Di Caprio’s character
being shot in a
canted angle to depict his growing
insanity from being an undercover cop.

I also frequently switched between handheld and steady camera shots in scenes of high
tension to disorientate the viewer, such as the in the final cliff scene, where there are
several quick cuts from wide angle shots of Nicholas running to save Judd, to handheld Point
of view shots, from Nicholas’s point of view looking at Judd getting closer and closer to the
cliff, which emphasises Nicholas’ panic at the prospect of his brother being about to die.

This is similar to several scenes in Echo, where Lewis uses handheld shaky camera shots to
similarly convey the panic and stress of the protagonist, which is also helped with his use of
a quick editing pace to ramp up the tension of the sequence, a technique I also opted for
particularly in the bathroom scene and final cliff scene, where I edit shots together, with
some lasting for only a half a second to fully envelope the spectator in the mood of the
sequence.

As for aesthetic, I decided on a naturalistic aesthetic, to symbolise how the film’s dilemma of
mental depression, is very much one rooted in reality, as it depression is very much a reality
Kit Parry 10802 NEA Evaluation

for many people, and so I wanted

to use continuity editing, to film
on locations such as the White
Cliffs of Dover and in an actual
cemetery, Wandsworth
Cemetery, to fully express the
naturalistic aesthetic of the film.
As for other parts of the set, I
used my bathroom to shoot the
bathroom scene, as it had the
right architectural structure by
being a small room with a mirror which I would be able to capture Judd, and a large sink
which would allow me to shoot an extreme close up of Judd splashing his face with water
from a side profile view. And as for the sequence where Nicholas calls the police, I used my
friend’s house and car, as he lives on a quiet street, which allowed me to shoot Nicholas
coming out of the house and getting into the car in one take, without endangering myself
while walking on the road while filming. Another health and safety risk which had to be
taken into consideration when making my film, was the fact that I needed to shoot certain
sequences on a cliff in order to achieve the correct look for the film, and also the fact that I
didn’t have the budget for CGI or realistic Visual effects. In order to be able to shoot on a
cliff, I had a discussion with my film teacher about the risk assessments of going to the cliffs
and having people standing near the edge of a cliffside. I made sure find a part of the Dover
Cliffs which looked like a cliff edge, but instead had a slope downwards instead of being a
complete cliff edge, giving the illusion that the characters were actually standing on the cliff
edge, while not endangering their lives. And as for the shot in the bathroom sequence
where there is a shot of the bottom of the cliff edge, I realised it was a dangerous idea, and
so thought of trying to shoot it another way, possibly having Judd lean over the camera and
look directly down the lens instead, but I felt that didn’t give enough gravitas to the
conclusion of the sequence and didn’t give the sensation of falling off a cliff. So instead, I
shot the full long take shot of slowly walking towards the cliff, which I intercut with shots of
Judd hyperventilating in the bathroom, and then did a separate shot of bottom of the cliff,
by tying the camera to my coat, then lying on the floor and tilting the camera down over the
edge of the cliff to shoot the sea at the bottom of the cliff.

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