Wednesday, Dec. 07, 2011
Split Screen: A Love Story
"Split Screen: A Love Story" was shot with simple camera (a Nokia phone) and has a simple premise: Two lovebirds wake up in different cities (New York and Paris) and set off on parallel journeys to meet each other. The use of split screen is nothing new in motion pictures or web video, but the editing sets this one apart. Marianne Kuopanportti meticulously marries each shot to its transatlantic counterpart. The coffee and tea mugs align, the airplanes take off in perfect symmetry and a truck in Paris seamlessly becomes a New York City taxi as it speeds across the screen. It's easy to predict how this one ends, but hard not to smile when it does.