Research.

The research arm of nengifilms exists to keep the practice honest. Films borrow ideas from somewhere — better if we know where, better still if we can return something to the field we borrowed from.

Current threads

• Multimodality — how meaning moves between sound, image, language, and gesture, and what cinema can learn from disciplines that already think across senses.
• Cognition and attention — how viewers actually see, what holds focus, what dissolves it, and what an honest film does with either.
• Learning — how we learn through different forms of media and narrative. What a story transmits that a lecture or a textbook cannot, and what each form is uniquely good at.
• Media technology + human-computer interaction — as we grow alongside our tools, the relationships between people and the technologies that increasingly shape how we live, work, remember, and connect. A field worth studying carefully, not just adopting blindly.
• Sustainability — there is no good reason to destroy the environment in order to progress as a society. How we make the things we make without breaking the ground we make them on.
• Human-centered design — yes, much of life is online now — that doesn't mean it should be. Honoring real-world collaboration, in-person community, and the forms of being-together that screens can't replicate. Building tools that respect, facilitate, and support sustainable, accessible, progressive ways to collaborate.
• Accessibility — captioning, audio description, color and contrast, sensory load. Not as compliance, but as craft.
• Innovation — redefining how things are done. Asking "could this be better?" at every level of the work — in service of efficiency, and of a better quality of life.

Active essays, field notes, and citations coming soon.