Cory Stillman
Depicting the internet in film and television is often considered a nearly impossible task. It can often appear clunky or inauthentic, but film editor Daniel Garber may have cracked the code with his work on Lance Oppenheim‘s FX documentary Spermworld. Garber is no stranger to representing online activity in the edit. His first fiction feature was Daniel Goldhaber’s CAM, the 2018 sleeper hit on Netflix.
“[CAM] is about a woman whose livelihood depends on the internet, so the film had hundreds of graphics and VFX shots featuring web interfaces,” says Garber. “Wrangling all of those graphics was such a challenge, but it gave me the creative toolkit I used years later for Spermworld.”
Spermworld welcomes viewers into the unexpected world of unregulated, direct-to-consumer sperm donation, introducing a colorful cast of characters along the way. Members of the community communicate primarily via Facebook groups, and so Garber had to find a way to appropriately capture these conversations.
“We created a series of interstitial graphics that show interactions in the Facebook groups, revealing a little of what the culture in these groups is like and answering some of the audience’s inevitable questions about people’s motives for participating in this black-market economy,” says Garber.
Indeed, many questions are likely to arise throughout your time watching Spermworld, but Garber’s lyrical editing is there to answer them all. The film is also among the most visually stunning documentaries in recent memory, and that remains true across both digital and real-life footage. In tracing the evolution of one particularly unique relationship between subjects Steve and Rachel, for example, Garber and his co-editor Emily Yue find ways to bring their messaging history to life.
“Emily and I selected a bunch of messages from Rachel and Steve, and Lance had them read those messages aloud as voiceovers,” Garber explains. “It creates an impression of two people having a slightly stilted conversation, eager for connection but with the slight awkwardness that online communication introduces.”
Garber most recently won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Editing for his work on Goldhaber’s sophomore effort, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. His work on Spermworld goes back even further, however, having begun way back in late 2020. Garber was heavily involved in the casting process for the documentary, a relative rarity for an editor.
“There are lots of factors that determine whether documentary subjects are compelling: their charisma, comfort with the camera, biographical details, psychological profile, and sources of conflict in their lives. Sometimes it helps to have an editor to consult even at such an early stage of the process,” says Garber.
Indeed, the final result speaks for itself. Spermworld is funny, strange, sorrowful, and profound. From its surprising subjects to its freshly modern editing, the film (available on Hulu) is a must-watch for all. Check out our full conversation with Garber below to hear his additional insights on the role of the internet in modern moviemaking, as well as the dynamic between him and co-editor Emily Yue.
How did you collaborate with the documentary team during the casting and initial shoots to shape the storyline?
The process of making Spermworld began all the way back in late 2020 when director Lance Oppenheim first heard about the world of unregulated, direct-to-consumer sperm donation from reporter Nellie Bowles — and I was already hooked based on that first exploratory shoot. We put together a fundraising trailer that really set the tone and style for the film.
When FX got involved, and we were able to start production in earnest, I was in frequent communication with Lance and the stellar producing team responsible for casting and research — Lauren Belfer, Christian Vazquez, Sophie Kissinger, and David Malmborg — and got a chance to chime in as they pounded the digital pavement to seek out interesting subjects. There are lots of factors that determine whether documentary subjects are compelling: their charisma, comfort with the camera, biographical details, psychological profile, and sources of conflict in their lives. Sometimes it helps to have an editor to consult even at such an early stage of the process.
The edit started when a fraction of the footage had been shot, so we had the chance to collaborate really fluidly, assembling the film while the story was still unfolding. One of the eternal headaches of documentaries is that you always have an excess of footage but not always the right kind. It helps to be able to say to a director, “Hey, I think you’ve done a great job of capturing this one kind of material, but what we could use now is a scene that accomplishes something totally different.” Lance is very receptive to this kind of suggestion and loves to watch rough cuts to inspire his future shoots, sometimes even sharing rough scenes with subjects and the team on set to give them a sense of what they’re all working toward.
What specific editing techniques did you use to create an emotionally involved and experiential film that felt like a narrative?
Documentaries are often thought of as being primarily informational and educational, and Lance is keen to try to break the documentary mold in that sense. I suspect that a big part of the reason he works with me is that my editing practice spans documentary and narrative films, and I try to use fiction techniques in service of documentary truth. Part of this is a conceptual reframing: we try to think less about providing the audience with facts that make our subjects or the world seem interesting from the outside and more about supplying the emotional hooks that allow you to subjectively identify with our participants in the way that a good fiction film lets you see the world through its characters’ eyes. The film was inspired by an article, but it’s not a work of journalism. What this means practically is a myriad of techniques: eschewing talking heads and instead treating interviews as a sort of confessional or internal monologue, paring down exposition to its barest essentials, and bringing in abstract visuals to figuratively represent the process of conception. The visual style, which is very fiction-like, would be impossible without the deliberateness of DP David Bolen’s approach to cinematography. His very methodical, locked-off shots make it possible for us to edit dialogue scenes in a way that almost makes them feel planned, which I think contributes to the sense of total immersion in the world in front of the camera instead of what’s behind it.
What were the main challenges you encountered while representing the online aspect of the story, and how did you address them?
Figuring out how to represent the internet is a struggle for so many filmmakers who try to authentically represent life in the 21st century, and it’s a task I’m familiar with. My first fiction feature, CAM (dir. Daniel Goldhaber), is about a woman whose livelihood depends on the internet, so the film had hundreds of graphics and VFX shots featuring web interfaces. Wrangling all of those graphics was such a challenge, but it gave me the creative toolkit I used years later for Spermworld. Many of the initial connections between sperm donors and recipients take place through these massive Facebook groups where prospective parents gather to exchange fertility tips and discuss their donor experiences, so the film had to have a way of representing that facet of the world. This also has great significance to the story: each of our subjects is lonely in a way — dealing with their private fertility struggles or striving to find meaning in the face of their own kind of adversity — and the thing that unites all of them in “spermworld” is the internet. So there are a couple of main avenues that we took to explore life online. First, we created a series of interstitial graphics that show interactions in the Facebook groups, revealing a little of what the culture in these groups is like and answering some of the audience’s inevitable questions about people’s motives for participating in this black-market economy. Second, we took some of our subjects’ direct messages and essentially turned them into dialogue scenes that track the evolution of their donor-recipient relationship.
Can you provide examples of the outside-the-box editing techniques you used to incorporate Facebook group interactions into the film?
Graphics representing the online groups became a huge part of the film’s world-building, and they were such a team effort to put together. Our additional graphics artist Elena Lee Gold helped set the look, creating these pared-down posts that evoke the feeling of social media without having a whole cluttered interface — something that felt like the graphical equivalent of a closeup that frames out a lot of the background. Our title designer Teddy Blanks ran with that and created our final graphics, implementing a subtle visual texture, a cue that almost subconsciously reminds you that you’re looking at a computer screen. Our sound designer Paul Hsu helped accentuate that feeling with some understated computer hardware sound effects that suggest the experience of sitting in front of a computer to browse the internet. Together, these techniques get at something that I think is sometimes forgotten when people try to represent the internet: it’s not just another layer grafted on top of our existing reality, but rather, screens are a huge part of our physical environment.
Co-Editor Emily Yue approached the graphics from a story standpoint and did some deep dives into the Facebook groups, sometimes with the aid of our producers, to pull conversations that were often amusing and revealed a lot about the mechanics of the sperm donation world. There was a lot of trial and error to determine what the right balance of graphics was in the finished film; they were a great pacing device to help transition among the main storylines, but there’s always the risk that such an element can feel distracting if overused, especially once you’re deep enough into the main characters’ experiences that any extraneous information about the “world” of sperm donation starts to bog down the pacing. So Emily and I spent a lot of time finessing this, editing down the conversations to be as lean as possible, and testing the film again and again to determine where the interstitial graphics felt truly additive to the experience.
How did you make the internet feel both cinematic and directly related to the characters’ story arcs?
The internet has the power to both connect and separate, and we wanted to represent that quality on-screen. I think that aspect is clearest with two of our subjects, Steve and Rachel, who have a particularly rich messaging history that does a beautiful job of charting their unusual friendship emerging from a donor-recipient relationship. Emily and I selected a bunch of messages from Rachel and Steve, and Lance had them read those messages aloud as voiceovers. It creates an impression of two people having a slightly stilted conversation, eager for connection but with the slight awkwardness that online communication introduces. Visually, we also tried to convey this sense of simultaneous separateness and connection. There are a few sequences in which the film goes into split-screen, showing Steve and Rachel going about their daily activities in isolation while the dialogue plays asynchronously in audio. It’s a bold stylistic gesture, but, more importantly, it feels rooted in the participants’ individual loneliness and the hope that the relationship represents to each of them.
How did you split the work between you and your team?
The editing team was tiny: just Co-Editor Emily Yue and me. Emily had excelled as my assistant editor on the indie narrative feature How to Blow Up a Pipeline (dir. Daniel Goldhaber), but I was eager to see her take on more creative tasks on Spermworld. She tackled the usual technical responsibilities of assisting — footage ingesting and organization, exports, and turnovers — but quickly proved her worth in the storytelling process, too. I was grateful to have her perspective in story meetings with Lance, as well as her capable editing hands in doing some of the initial scene assemblies and, farther down the line, addressing notes. We created an outline of the film in Notion, which was hugely helpful because we could put notes into the database and then assign scenes so it was clear who was responsible for what.
One other invaluable part of the post process was getting feedback from trusted outside voices. Emily and I shared an office with the team for Ren Faire, the HBO miniseries Lance was directing at the same time, and we benefited from a lot of cross-pollination with that team. It was tremendously helpful to tap Max Allman and Nick Nazmi, the Ren Faire editors, for the occasional reaction to what Emily and I were working on.
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