Short Film - drama - black and white

The Briefcase

Z (Zeus) tracks down Prom (Prometheus) to an ambiguous era of man. Prom possesses another stolen item of Z which he intends to give to man to trigger evolution.

The Briefcase was shot on the Canon C500 with Canon CN-E primes, recording RAW externally to an Atomos and graded to black and white in post. The monochrome choice was driven by the film's mythological register and by Kurt Martin's desire to strip the visual language back to pure light and shadow, where every frame plays out as figure against ground rather than colour against colour.

The most explicit visualisation of that approach is the profile two-shot of Zeus and Prometheus against a wall: Zeus dressed in white, Prometheus in black, the background painted in contrasting brightness behind them. The composition collapses the entire premise of the film — two polarised forces in tension — into a single still-graphic frame. That kind of reductive, symbol-first staging only works in monochrome, where light and dark stop being descriptive and start being characters in their own right.

Black and white also gave the production a practical freedom: with colour stripped out, modern locations, wardrobe and props could read as a timeless setting for a story playing out in an ambiguous era of human evolution. The decision freed the film to exist outside of recognisable time, which is exactly where a story about Zeus and Prometheus needed to live.