Directed by Phoebe Ball...
My Short Films
I have directed numerous short films, primarily dark comedies that use bold, offbeat storytelling to explore human emotion from a distinctive perspective. More recently, I have produced both a short and a feature-length film, directed by Won Jang and funded by Korea, which are aiming for the festival circuit in the coming year.
Two sisters attempt to cope with the grief of losing their mother by scattering her ashes in Cornwall, however their relationship reaches crisis point as they are unable to navigate their new dynamic without her.
This short film film tells the story of a man who tells his wife to find love again if he dies. Unfortunately, he does just that, and has to watch his wife move on
as he observes as a ghost. This is a story of love and loss, interlaced with darkly comical moments that call for talented actors with a knowledge of comic delivery.
A 5-minute visceral drama based on the poem ‘Giuseppe’. An old man tells his nephew a story of how, as a starving aquarium keeper in WW2, he and some locals found a ‘mermaid’ and decided to kill and then eat it. As he tells this story we realise that it was actually a woman, but they convinced themselves that it was just a mythical fish in order to salve their conscience.
The Curse explores a woman’s sexual awakening and the insecurities that shape her self-image. Beginning with her first period, she discovers sensuality, but fears of unattractiveness soon surface, embodied by the witches who stalk her. Overwhelmed by insecurity, she ultimately tears off her skin and is burned at the stake.
Straight 8 is a global filmmaking challenge that dares filmmakers to create a complete film on a single roll of Super 8mm, with no retakes, editing, grading, or post-production, shooting entirely in-camera while making the soundtrack blind and seeing the finished film for the first time alongside the audience.
Produced, directed, and filmed by Phoebe Ball, the film was a grassroots project made on a small budget with friends and family helping out. Inspired by the aesthetic possibilities of Super 8, Phoebe handled every aspect of production, from camerawork and special effects makeup to sound editing and vocals. Though rough around the edges, the film’s strength lies in its striking imagery and the ethereal rawness of 8mm film.
In the summer of 2024 I took part in London Doc in a Day's 36 Hour documentary competition, where you are put into a group with strangers Saturday morning, given a theme, and then have to make a documentary together which is delivered Sunday evening.
This year's theme was desire, to which our group took an unconventional take on, opposing the obvious connotations of lust with the theme of death. We follow Martin, a tour-guide at Highgate Cemetery, as he shows us around the grounds and talks about what the Victorians desired in their lifetime, which was eternal life after death. This was because their lives were often cut so short they had to believe in something more after their passing. Martin on the other hand, and many of us now, don't believe in the afterlife, and so we desire to be remembered after we die and live on in the memories of others. Martin believes he has achieved this through his teaching.
In a worn-down theatre in the middle of nowhere, five mime artists compete for the prize money of £1,000,000 Their task: solving a seemingly staged murder while staying silent.
But when another corpse is found, the afternoon becomes more and more eerie as they now have a real murder to solve. Will they be able to find the murderer among them before more people die?
Mime Me a Murder is a comedic spin on the beloved classic murder mystery, with characters who refuse to break their act, despite the extreme circumstances they find themselves in. With the help of your donations, we hope to take the audience on a tense mission to find the murderer amongst five mimes, all of them more suspicious than they might seem...
For my undergraduate dissertation, I had to create a documentary treatment and budgeting/scheduling narrative, along with taster tape, for a documentary I had devised to theoretically pitch to a broadcaster.
For my taster tape, I included a mixture of interviews with contributors whom I sourced and interviewed myself, and archive footage of clowns, in order to give the best insight possible into how the documentary would feel
Why are clowns so frightening? Reece Shearsmith explores the evolution of the clown character from an artform to a classic horror trope which people love to hate.
A Dinner Party
A man prepares a beautiful dinner in a lavish house, speaking to us as if he is part of a cookery show. He creates each aspect of the feast with great precision – the dinner party must be perfect as a new addition to the family is attending. Everything must be perfect and we see just how mentally unstable he is when something minor goes wrong with a strawberry and he aggressively destroys it with a huge mallet. Once he has finished he sits at the head of the table and begins carving the meat; the camera tracks back to reveal a dead body in the background and mannequins instead of real people sitting around the table – the man has killed this ‘new addition’ to the family and has placed a mannequin to represent them.
