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.
The post-production editing process, helmed by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, took an agonizing one and a half years. Because the “camera” is a desktop screen, editing became the primary storytelling tool.
The Cursor as Actor
C’est magnifique. Johnson and Merrick had to essentially build the entire film’s visual language from scratch within Adobe Premiere. They used the hesitation of a mouse cursor to convey doubt. They used the frantic speed of a backspace key to convey panic. They used the rhythm of typing and the tragedy of deleted text strings to expose the subtext of the protagonist’s grief.
In Searching, the UI is the set, and the cursor is the lead actor. The editors’ mastery of this hyper-specific format was so absolute that when the studio greenlit a sequel, Missing, they did not hire a new director. They hired Johnson and Merrick.
Insights regarding the inverted production timeline (13 days of shooting versus 1.5 years of editing) and the elevation of editors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick to directors for the sequel were drawn from production details cataloged on Wikipedia.