A Brief History of Texting in Movies

Modern filmmakers face a problem: How do you represent text messaging in a film? There are many ways to do it, though for years now, the default answer has been "stupidly big, fake text on a stupidly closeup phone" or, in some cases, texters reading along their messages. (The same problem exists for IMs on computers, and a related issue is just how you represent "things that happen on the Internet" onscreen.)

In the video essay below, Tony Zhou examines all this stuff and presents some of the better ways we've seen directors handle the issue (it's no spoiler to say that Sherlock did it very well). Silence your phones and enjoy:

A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

(Via MetaFilter.)