Screen in Screen

A display inside the shot carries its own picture, so the frame holds two images at once and the audience compares them.

It is also how most information arrives now. A phone, a monitor or a television in shot delivers text, a face or a live feed without any cut to a separate insert.

Name what is on the screen. A blank display is a rectangle, and a display showing a face, a headline or a security feed is a second scene.

Match the exposure. Screens are much brighter than rooms, so a correctly exposed room gives a blown white rectangle, and a correctly exposed screen gives a black room. Pick one, or ask for a dim screen in a dim room.

Watch the refresh. Real cameras can beat against a display and produce rolling bands, which reads as authentic in found footage and as a fault everywhere else.

Use it when a character receives information, when two places have to be in one frame, and in any story told through devices.

Skip it when the screen would say what a face could. A shot of somebody reading bad news is usually stronger than a shot of the message.

Split screen divides the frame into panels with an editorial line between them. A screen in screen keeps one continuous frame and the second image belongs to an object inside it.

An insert cuts to the detail on its own. A screen in screen keeps the room and the display in the same shot.

Aneesh Chaganty tells all of Searching (2018) through displays, and Levan Gabriadze does the same in Unfriended (2014), so every scene is a screen inside the screen the audience is watching. Buster Keaton had already played with the idea in Sherlock Jr. (1924), where a projectionist walks out of the auditorium and into the film on the screen.

The model returns a blown out white panel with nothing legible on it. Name the content and say the screen is legible, dimmer than it would really be.

The second failure is a screen showing generic glowing shapes. Describe the image on the display as carefully as you describe the room.