Call of the Void is a unique short at this year’s deadCenter Film Festival, part of the Okie Shorts 2 block, from first-time director Jack McDonald. It creates a sort of between-world that still feels fully realized and (as most shorts should) could be a solid proof-of-concept for a feature.
The short follows a captive man forced to look back at a traumatic moment in his youth when he was part of an apparent religious cult. Sign me up!
I spoke with McDonald via email ahead of the fest, beginning with his inspiration for the story.
Exploring Call of the Void’s big ideas with a short runtime on a microbudget
“I believe what makes a film really great is when you invite the audience into your world and leave them discussing the film with others long after the credits roll,” McDonald said. “In the very early stages of conceptualizing Call of the Void, I spoke with my fellow producer Brooks Sherman about how important it was for the film to be perceived in a variety of ways. Our film deals with universal experiences such as guilt, memories, forgiveness, and what occurs in the afterlife, and we pushed these themes to the extreme in a psychological thriller setting. We hope with every viewing people come away with different interpretations of the film and on rewatches, they catch something they may have missed before.”
Shorts filmmakers are making slices of features, essentially, and production value can be just as important here. So how did the team manage that?
“While developing Call of the Void‘s story we were very aware of the constraints in the budget, locations, actors, crew, and time that we had,” McDonald said. “We wrote with locations in mind and took note of what we already had available to us, such as the studio space in our college that we renovated into the interrogation room set. When you write with constraints in mind I believe this actually opens you up to more creative possibilities as you give yourself parameters to work within. When working on a small budget, writing with limitations affords you the luxury of focusing on actor performances, perfecting the cinematography for the setups you have, and overall not rushing the production due to creating beyond your means.”
The perfect project to capstone the college experience
McDonald is truly local as an OU grad. I asked what he was most proud of in the short.
“I’m really proud of the production and everyone involved in this film,” he said. “This was my final thesis project while attending the University of Oklahoma and it felt like those four years had been leading up to this event. I set out with the intention of developing my skill set in those four years. I created smaller micro films, worked on documentaries, and music videos, created content for Oklahoma football, and worked on every freelance project that came my way. Everyone who was a part of this film I met through those experiences. I picked them because they’re all extremely talented and dedicated to their craft. I couldn’t be more grateful for my time making this film in Oklahoma and the people that believed in me and helped bring this vision to life.”
Shining a Light and Lens on Call of the Void’s Vision
Full disclosure—Todd Blankenship, the cinematographer, is a buddy of mine and one of the most creative filmmakers I know. We DM’d about the film, and he shared some of its technical secrets.
“We shot the film on a Blackmagic Ursa 12K and a set of self-modded Soviet lenses (Helios 44-2, Mir 1-B, etc) that I took part a few years ago and added a bunch of stuff inside of (anamorphic aperture discs, fishing line for flares, etc.),” he wrote. “We used a Tokina 11-16 for some of the scenes in the cabin as well. That was a super tight location so we used super wide lenses a lot to be able to give more of a sense of scale.”
I also had to ask about the amazing golden light in the short, locations, visual references, and challenges of the shoot.
“The biggest challenge we had was locations. We wanted the interrogation scene to feel different than your run-of-the-mill cliche interrogation scene, and we wanted it to feel as surreal as possible immediately,” Todd wrote. “We wanted everything to feel kind of rooted in a sort of spiritual religious feel. So the whole interrogation scene was shot in one of OU’s studios, with some homemade stained glass windows that were just panes of plastic with stained glass stickers on them. We used fake candles as well in the background to give it an almost religious or ceremonial feel. For the rest of the set, we decided to just let become part of the shadows and shot enough light through the ‘windows’ with leko lights that everything else disappeared.
“For all the stuff during the ceremony scene, we shot in a small cabin in the middle of the woods. We struggled to find the right space for those scenes for a while, even almost shooting the entire scene at a different place before deciding it wasn’t right. We had initially set the whole scene in a sort of ‘storage room’ type area, but everything we were doing just didn’t feel right, and we were wrestling with every setup to get the look we wanted. The cabin we found was perfect and all the blocking finally snapped right into place. It was such a great example of making sure the location is right instead of just fighting it to try and make things work.”
Call of the Void has a very distinct look that helps it stand out in the shorts lineup. Characters are backlit in a glare of harsh light for its entire runtime.
“We decided early on to go for this really harsh orange feel for the film. It was kind of based on the suggestion of hell, but we wanted it to almost feel like a type of purgatory on the verge of hell. The color palette was derived primarily from this old photograph (that was later turned into a painting) called Grace by Eric Enstrom. It was a picture framed at my grandmother’s house (I’ve since seen it at little shops and small-town restaurants about a hundred times as an adult) that always gave me a sort of deeply unsettling feeling for some reason as a child. When I read Jack’s Call of the Void script, for some reason Grace almost immediately came to mind.”
