During the epidemic, the overseas film and television industry was shut down, but Pingqi Film had a unique scenery, and the production advantages that were not limited by venues and personnel were infinitely magnified. The much-anticipated sequel to "Cyber Mystery Trail" has been put on the production schedule, and its producer, Timo Bekmanbertov, has more than 50 projects in different degrees of incubation.
As the predecessor of screen-perch films, tabletop movies have long been dormant in the small spaces of independent production. Tracing back to the source, this kind of experimental video based on screen recording and webcam gradually took shape in the early millennium with the rise of the Internet and social media. But a number of early works have been running within the framework of low-budget thrillers, until 2014's "Unfriend" set the first milestone in the commercial value of desktop films, and the 2018 topic "Internet Mystery Trail" once again grossed 75 million at the global box office with a budget of less than one million US dollars, enough to make the desire for small and large capital come to the fore. The evolutionary concept of screen-perch films was thus formally proposed, and embarked on the road of genre and commercialization.
It is foreseeable that a wave of screen-perch films is about to come, releasing a new possibility of video art in the post-media era, a reproduction of contemporary digital life and a self-renewal under the scope of technical aesthetics.
The film embraces the camera aesthetic, and the collarbone becomes the golden section of the composition
When Beckman Betov first pitched his new concept to Universal Pictures, all he got was puzzlement and questioning. These industry-savvy film merchants simply can't imagine that they can complete a big-screen work by simply recording a few "small broken screens" without expensive cameras? Interestingly, after experiencing the epidemic of home isolation, the public's application and understanding of screen images has reached an unprecedented density and height, and the film genre of Screen Perch has suddenly possessed self-evident persuasion ability. It can convince capital, to convince the audience that it is no longer a technical rhetoric, but can tell a story in a serious way, like all movies.
"Small broken screen" can tell a story, and to achieve the volume of a feature film, it requires a lot of synergy, the first point is that the film gladly accepts the camera aesthetic. The film "Reaper of Souls" released in 2020 set the story in a home isolation period, a group of friends are bored, only through zoom connection to communicate with each other, but witnessed a series of thrilling events. So juxtaposed in the frame, a large number of close-up head shaking images form the core part of the image presentation, and the familiar perspectives and interface trances make people suspect that they are part of the cloud conference, rather than watching a movie. Another micro-film with the epidemic as the background of the story, "Love in Isolation", has launched an exploration of the screen perching of love films. In the past, the dialogue and interactive scenes with over-the-shoulder cuts and soft close-ups were replaced by the screen-in-screen screen of the video phone, and the entire film completed the narrative with a vertical screen structure.
This aesthetic taste obviously deviates from the lens standards inherited from the film era, the scene, the depth of field, the composition, the movement, everything from simple to ugly, but this conscious "regression" is just a trend for the film as a mass art, absorbing the fruits of technological change and accepting the domestication of life aesthetics. For the examination of the aesthetics of the camera, it can be traced back to the selfie culture. The daguerreotype that came out in the 1830s has achieved the earliest selfie image, and the modern sense of selfie behavior originated in Japan's big head sticker, this "kawaii" subculture is characterized by face close-up matching scissor hands, with the popularity of mobile phone front cameras, selfies spread in the online world in the early 21st century. This historical evolution determines the aesthetic core of the selfie image: the absoluteness of the subject. On the one hand, the selfie itself is a statue form that limits the distance between objects to an arm's length; on the other hand, self-imaging and display are completed under small frames such as head stickers and mobile phone screens, and the "big head" that fills the picture frame becomes the meaning of the title, and the collarbone becomes the golden section line of the composition, which also constitutes the original law of camera aesthetics. Others with the end were the Vlogs that developed later, as well as Zoom conferences and Zoom images in cloud classrooms.
These statically rotated image forms further enrich the connotation of camera aesthetics and clarify the imaging consensus in the context of the camera: First, whether it is an individual image or a group portrait, the pursuit of the subject is centered, and the face image occupies the absolute field of the picture. A dynamic imaging structure that allows the edges of the subject image to be cropped or even repeatedly "rubbed" against the frame when there are too many people, too short objects, or large movements. Second, the extremely high image quality tolerance. Although high-definition shooting has become the standard of existing cameras, some machine audiovisual instabilities are still very obvious, including: front wide angle, which is becoming more and more popular to cater to group selfies, resulting in visible barrel distortion; repeated out-of-focus in low light and automatic mode; video and audio lag caused by network instability, or pixel disturbance at the time of clear and turbidity; and strong distortion of filters at the cost of destroying skin details and distorting facial features. Such uncontrollable composition and unstable conditions that are tried to avoid in traditional films, because the public use and training of cameras day after day, and get automatic fault tolerance, and even regarded as an inevitable procedure in the implementation of camera images, which provides the most effective and basic image expression and writing tools for screen film creators.
Technology is used for storytelling, and cold machine language can also achieve high emotional output
The camera image constitutes the cornerstone of the screen-perch film language, and the uniqueness of the complete system lies in the borrowing of electronic data symbols. This year, an Indian film directed and written by Mahish Narayanan " continued the "mystery trail" road: the male protagonist network met the mysterious woman, the feelings were heating up, the woman left a farewell video to evaporate, the male protagonist naturally could not escape the suspicion and went to prison, as a software engineer's cousin stepped forward, the Cyber version of Holmes gorgeous possession, positioning search, account cracking, information tracking, many god operations opened a black curtain of transnational traffickers. The film reproduces these network traces in a tense rhythm, with a large number of data symbols participating and dominating the narrative. How to smoothly coordinate and compile these complex and novel non-traditional film symbols, so that they have semantic legibility and codec reproducibility, is the necessary premise for the evolution of Pingqi film from experimental products to industrial products.
Beckman Bettov drew on Aristotle's theory of drama and proposed the trinity of screen-perch creation. First, spatial consistency: all plots can only occur on a specific screen of a specified character, and the screen size must be constant; the audience needs to know the source and formation process of any type of information on the screen at all times; if the picture is not from the original content such as screen recording or camera, it must simulate the camera to complete the supplementary shooting. Second, time is consistent: all behaviors need to occur here and now, recorded in real time, and there can be no visible breaks and transitions. Third, the sound is consistent: whether it is a voice call or an audio file, all sounds must be generated by the electronic device to which the screen belongs, and passive sound is prohibited.
The prototype of the Screen-Perch language system can already be seen by bayman's Trinity, but its shortcoming is that it tries to emphasize the technological innovation of the Screen-Perch film with unusual objectivity. And once the form is greater than the content, kidnapped by technology, the movie will be story demented, the tired audience is naturally unwilling to continue to pay, and the sequel to "Unfriend" and many imitation works have not achieved much, and it is expected.
Fortunately, a group of young directors, including Anish Chaganti, director of "Cyber Mystery Trail", refused to accept the production system in its entirety, determined to explore new paths for the use of technology for stories. Specifically, how to use the imaging paradigm of traditional films and break through the visual limitations of screen recording and cameras? How to replace objectivity with subjectivity and achieve high emotional output based on cold machine language? The latter points to the composite pointing that data symbols may have in film narratives, which is the core problem of the screen-perch language system. In many occasions such as chat boxes, search bars, schedules, etc., text input is given a richer narrative meaning in addition to the literal meaning: writing a line of information, hesitating to delete or withdraw one by one; jumping between multiple message boxes, responding to the information of different characters reflecting each other or contradicting each other; the frequency of reply, the speed of input, the selection of memes, or a long wait, all clearly constitute a series of emotional cues and psychological shaping.
The direct application of textual information in the film on such a large scale is difficult to reach even in the intermission of the silent film era, which intuitively reflects a self-renewal of the film. The machine symbols represented by text data and program operations have brought new visual spectacles and narrative means; the flashing of cursors at times and the unfolding and stacking of multi-task windows all constitute a new form of film scene scheduling. The aesthetic characteristics of screen montage are thus based on the public's digital life experience, and through the organization, aggregation and collision of various types of data, they produce dramatic significance, which is also common to electronic art in the post-media era.
Although there are still some problems that remain to be solved, Screenwing Movie has opened up a dimension for independent producers from all over the world to enter the mainstream industry, and a large number of Screenlifer have also begun to create passionate short videos. No one can predict how far this genre will go, but the art of cinema is constantly pushing its boundaries in its fearless exploration.
Author: Hua Hui, Deputy Director of the Department of Film and Television, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Editor: Zhou Minxian
!["Network Mystery Trail" was released in theaters, why did the audience feel blindfolded?[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)