It’s So Over By John Merizalde

John Merizalde on his latest film, It’s So Over: “For me, the short is a combination of anxieties that exist in our digital age. Being surveilled, mistaken identity, being hunted by a pitchfork mob - all things made even scarier when they are digitized and anonymized. In order to further serve this narrative, we conceived the story as told fully through the lens of data collection. This includes all the kinds of devices that surround our panopticon, not just video but transcending into audio and the more abstract. Every shot is diegetic - surveillance cameras, iPhones, Macbooks, Tesla cams, Apple Vision Pro, Ring camera, screen captures, heart rate data, sleep monitoring, etc. We had nearly three dozen different devices and many dozens more screen captures to construct our panopticon.”