Creative Problem Solving

Contemporary science fiction is obsessed with sterile, aerodynamic futures. Studios waste hundreds of millions on CGI to render spaceships that look like polished Apple products tumbling through the void. Claire Denis, naturally, rejected this entirely for High Life. Creative Problem Solving: The Brutalist Aesthetic Bref, Denis did not hire a VFX house to design her spacecraft. She hired Olafur Eliasson, the renowned Danish-Icelandic installation artist, to architect the vessel and its stark, psychological lighting. ...

In traditional filmmaking, the editor is a sculptor, chiseling away at the raw material provided by the director and cinematographer. But what happens when there is no traditional camera? What happens when the entire film exists solely on a computer screen? In Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching, the editor does not just shape the film; the editor animates it. Creative Problem Solving: The Screenlife Mechanics Bref, the “Screenlife” format of Searching completely inverted the traditional production timeline. Principal photography—the actual filming of the actors interacting with their webcams—took a mere 13 days to complete. But this footage was useless on its own. ...

Bref, the old guard of the film industry looks at YouTubers with a mixture of confusion and profound disdain. We see loud teenagers making prank videos and assume they have no discipline for the grueling marathon of feature filmmaking. But Danny and Michael Philippou proved exactly why this arrogance is fatal. With Talk to Me, they didn’t just transition from YouTube to a $4.5 million A24 feature; they brought the frantic, fearless energy of the internet and weaponized it within a traditional production structure. ...

Bref, the old model of film distribution is dead, and Kyle Edward Ball danced on its grave for the price of a used Honda Civic. We are constantly told that you need a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and a PR agency to get a film seen. Skinamarink proves that you actually only need two things: $15,000, and a catastrophic security breach. The narrative of this film’s success is a complete subversion of the studio system. It is a terrifying masterclass in the sheer, unpredictable power of the internet hive mind. ...