Drawing on napkins

I want to show you a little test I did for the film. First, a little context.

I fuckin hate seeings screens on screen. Like when a character in a film looks at their phone, then we see their phone. I hate that shit so much. It’s purely bias, I have no justification or rationalization for my hate.

But, I’ve decided to make a film about a character who works on a laptop. And she scrolls like the rest of us. Now I have to decide how I want to show the stuff I usually hate to see in a film. So, here’s a test I did for a particular.

I have this idea that I don’t really want to see what our character sees on their screen, but I want to show how it feels to scroll and scroll and scroll. I like the idea of the screen becoming a kind of abstraction.

When I started thinking of this shot, I wondered what I remembered from the last time I scrolled. I couldn't recall a single thing. I remembered a certain numbness setting in as I stopped, I remembered how it felt. So, with this shot, I want to show how that feels.

I especially like the end of this test where the scrolling is fast and camera’s too close, so it’s all out of focus, and it doesn’t look much like a scrolling screen, there’s no real information coming through anymore.

For this shot, I just grabbed my wife’s phone and recorded this to get it out of my head (can you tell I’ve been shopping for glasses?). The final version in the film won’t look exactly like this, but now we have a sense of where we’re going with it.

I love this part of the process, the early, really lo-fi versions of ideas.