Screenlife

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 modern internet is a sterile, corporate shopping mall. But those of us who grew up with dial-up remember it as a lawless, haunted landscape—a place where you could vanish entirely. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun captures this ephemeral terror not to frighten us, but to map the internal architecture of gender dysphoria. Anatomy of the Craft: A Digital Haunting Bref, Schoenbrun ignores the hyper-polished aesthetics of the contemporary internet. Instead, they root the visual language of the film in 2012-era amateur creepypasta YouTube videos and desolate message boards. ...