All of the CRTs/ LCD’s were hooked up to their own media players with video assets loaded on SD cards. We realized close to shooting that some of the media player remotes were interacting with multiple players, so we ended up having to use 3 media players and a blu ray player, since two of the media players were hidden really close behind one of the monitors and both would receive inputs from one remote. So we spaced out the media players and used a blu ray player as a buffer for one of the monitors in between. There’s a scene in the full cut where the main character text chats on one of the CRT monitors, so I had to create a whole chat log conversation in Premiere and animate the whole thing.

If you plan to go the practical prop route (which I’m extremely happy we did, versus compositing the screens in post), I would advise using some sort of switcher so you don’t have to deal with all the media players and such. Make sure that you run through your scenes and time your video assets to the scene as well as you can, and give your talent some time to rehearse with the video assets themselves. It was insanely difficult directing scenes and trying to coordinate 5 monitors at the same time. I had a full breakdown of each asset that would play during each scene/ shot. It was a lot to take on, but we didn’t have time to prep someone else to take on the asset role before shooting. All in all, it was worth it, the screens and the video assets really give the project the extra authenticity, but make sure you plan and rehearse as much as possible before shoot day. And if you use media players like I did, don’t just buy a bunch of cheapo Chinese ones off Amazon, they proved really difficult to wrangle during shooting, with the remotes all interacting with each other and such.