The Photocopier Runs at Night — Office Liminal

An 8-second bureaucratic mortality horror short, 16:9, shot as phone footage: an office copier running at midnight, printing the worker's own face — each copy older than the last. The hook: the scan bed holds the worker's own aged hand.
0-2s: Office, midnight. The camera follows the sound down the empty floor: the copier room, fluorescents flickering. The big office copier is running though the floor is empty — spitting pages into the tray with mechanical patience. The worker approaches, filming.
2-5s: The pages show a face — the worker's own face — photocopied in grainy black and white. Page after page, the face ages: lines deepening, hair greying, eyes sinking, until the final pages show a skull grinning in the copier's harsh contrast. The copier doesn't stop — it keeps printing, the skull pages piling up, the machine growing hot, the smell of burning toner filling the room.
5-8s: On the copier's small display, the copy count climbs past ten thousand. The glass lid lifts on its own. On the scan bed lies the worker's own hand — and it's the aged hand from the final copies, liver-spotted, trembling. The scanning strobe fires. Cut on the flash.
Craft: the subjects are the worker (phone-filming, alone) and the copier as the entity — the tray of aging faces, the climbing counter, the lifting lid; the empty office as the fluorescent stage. Camera: shaky phone footage, a push toward the tray, a macro of the pages, a final lid-lift reveal. Lighting: flickering fluorescent, the copier's scanning strobe as the pulse. Atmosphere: bureaucratic mortality dread — the machine knows your future. Style: phone footage, office realism, strobe effects, 24fps, 8 seconds, 16:9.