If the fashion world has a master of surreal, wildly beautiful cinematographic fashion visions, then Vanessa Bruno is it. Enter her new film, Moonlight, which features an exquisite other-wordly feminine being embodied by who else but Kate Bosworth? She travels through various times and landscapes, aided and empowered by a distinct Vanessa Bruno uniform—one where sharply tailored silhouettes meet ladylike, delicate details (and a touch of futuristic embellishment).

We start with Bosworth in an unknown land, where she daintily traipses through a dusky desert, performs some highly stylized Matrix slash Inception-esque gravity defying sequences in a red-hued house before flashing back to a former life in California, where grainy, flickering cinematography illuminate Bosworth in all her 60s-inspired glory. The pastel colors and nostalgic charm then quickly blur into stunning landscape scenery, as Bosworth cycles alongside Black Beauty in the desert, before unleashing her divine power with a radiant salute to the moon (Lars Von Trier would surely approve). All in all the heady mix of lighting, scenery, exquisite clothing and the perfect fairytale muse give us a visual feast for the senses.

Directed by Stephanie Di Giusto—a collaborator on past films for Bruno including Lov (also with Bosworth) and Miracle starring Parisian icon Lou Doillon—Moonlight invokes a similar aesthetic, one where nature and the mystical reign supreme. It’s clear that this environment is the perfect backdrop to showcase Bruno’s ensembles—an intriguing mix of ladylike and futuristic chic—a shift dress adorned with lace and metallic silver patches, the olive twinset Bosworth busts out for her cycling duel with the black stallion or the final dreamy purple dress adorned with silver studs. Just ripe for the modern day supernatural goddess within us all, one that’s free, independent and oh so stylish.

Beyond camp clichés and sidekicks to housewives on seemingly every reality show on the air, gay men can actually be, you know, people. Some are awkward and cranky, some don’t care about Lady Gaga and some are, in the words of It Gets Betterish‘s Eliot Glazer and Brent Sullivan, “gay weirdos drowning in a sea of fierceness.”

Whether it sees them navigating the waters of AIDS tests, prospective orgies, self-appointed fag hags or the horror of meeting a gay republican, Eliot and Brent’s comedy web series has hit a nerve with audiences online, as well as MTV’s Clutch blog, who named it one of the 5 Web Comedies to Watch in 2012.

Considering their status as cewebrities, we called on Eliot and Brent to share a selection of their own favorite YouTube videos with us in this week’s What We’re Watching.

Click through to see their choices, and become a fan of It Gets Betterish on Facebook here.

It’s difficult to live in any urban hub in 2012 and not hear the word “hipster” uttered countless times each week. Whether it’s in the context of people complaining about the apparent recent influx of them, yearning to be identified as one or denying they are one, never before has a word with such vague and hazy definitions caused such contentious debate. In any case, filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton has chosen this label to run with in his debut feature film, I Am Not a Hipster, that last week premiered to great acclaim in the Official Selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

“Going there this year with a feature film was pretty different than going with a short,” Cretton told us after he returned home from the festival, referring to Short Term 12, the short film he took to Sundance in 2009. “It was seriously one of the best experiences of my life. I met some incredible filmmakers there whose friendships have lasted long after the festival.”

His experience at this year’s festival was unparalleled, though, if only for the fact that the audiences for and hype surrounding feature film screenings are much greater than they are for shorts. “It’s pretty crazy watching all these people line up to come and see your movie,” Cretton, who saw each screening sell out, said. “During our premiere screening I thought my chest was going to explode”

The storyline of the film centers around San Diego-based musician Brook Hyde (played by Dominic Bogart), who is dealing with the double-barreled heartache that resulted from a break-up with his girlfriend and the death of his mother. The music Brook produces in the film’s narrative may have been performed by him, but it was written by Joel P West, whose alias Canines is a band he created specifically for the movie.

“He wrote the entire album from the perspective of the film’s main character,” Cretton told us, “He and Dominic worked together to create the voice and sound of the character’s music.” The collaborative relationship between Bogart and West is surely music to Cretton’s ears (sorry), considering they were a large part of his reasons for embarking on this film in the first place.

“This movie started out as an excuse to work with Dominic Bogart (one of my favorite actors) and Joel P West (one of my favorite musicians). I was excited about the idea of creating a character-driven story that took place inside the indie-music scene in San Diego, which was a world I grew to love while living there for 10 years. When we shot the film, we called on the talents of all our friends from that community…so it was a film that was made by the community that it’s portraying.”

That’s what I Am Not a Hipster really boils down to, after all: the celebration and acknowledgement of a creative community, rather than one about pretentiousness or self-awareness. The connotations of the word in the title, Cretton told us, are sure to leave viewer’s (and doubter’s) minds not long after the opening titles.

“I think once people watch the film, they’ll see that this isn’t just some silly spoof on hipsterdom. What starts out as something seemingly shallow, turns into an intimate story about family, friendship, and the difficulty in dealing with loss. I’ve never been too fond of labels in general, and hope this movie helps to tear down some of the stereotypes associated with this subculture.”

Become a fan of I Am Not A Hipster here, and download the Canines record here.

Creative guy Chris Crutchfield explains the inspiration behind his new short film Digitals was the occasionally overwhelming nature of being connected: “One day I got an email, an SMS, a phone call, a Facebook message and two tweets all within about 5 seconds of one another. This video is a re-manifestation of my brain’s interpretation of that event.”

We’d like to think that such brain-melting technological overloads weren’t a regular occurrence in our iWorld; that we all weren’t so tragically dependent on communication and updating every second of our lives that we could keep a regular pace. But no, this is familiar to most of us: on any given day a notification/ringing explosion is likely to happen, and will certainly cripple your sanity instantly.

The soundscape of Digitals is very impressive (you can already download it as a ringtone! So your calls and notifications are even more irritatingly enhanced!) and rather than being purely an annoying mash up, it kind of slides into this rhythmic, electronica anthem of our iPhones—it’s almost catchy, even. Flawlessly (and just so digitally crisp) shot on the RED, Digitals is a gimmick with elegance, class and sensational art direction.

It’s so easy for us to live in a paperless world nowadays; there’s a device for every kind of papery function you might need—your calendar, books, magazines, mail and bills have been floating about cyberspace, rather than your desk, for a while now. Heck, even some restaurants have started to bring their menus out on iPads. Talented graphic designer/paper engineer Benja Harney, a Sydney local, thrives on a medium that increasingly is being left behind: that rich smelling, smooth, scrunch-worthy thing called paper.

Made as part of the inspiring Slashies series where creatives expose their two sides and explore their passions outside of their 9-5 grind, Harney’s story is extremely impressionable as he talks us through his passion for paper. For six years Harney spent his weekdays designing layouts for The Sunday Telegraph and spent every spare moment on his fragile endeavours with his freelance work at self-started company Paperform. Since then he’s done some incredible work, all with folding, cutting and gluing coloured sheets together: Kylie Minogue’s exclusive pop-up book is staggering; he’s created magazine covers, fantastic shop window displays and all manner of sculptures made entirely from paper, something Harney believes we’ve come to see as “forgotten”. Now Harney has thrown in the towel at his desk job and is working at Paperform full time, ready to create fine and flimsy “worlds that fold away.”

We know Chloe Sevigny is down for a little androgyny. The marketing team at Korean design house Tomboy must have agreed because they have chosen her sultry features to represent the brand for their Spring/Summer 2012 campaign. She provides the perfect frame and delicate silhouette for their loose, boyish garments to fall ever so elegantly on.

Shot by fashion photographer Daniel Jackson, Sevigny shines with a short, sassy bob and cherry red lips, a killer combination to give the garments just the right amount of 60s-inspired femininity. Sevigny not only brings her smile to the shoot, but also her personality, which radiates through each and every affable snarl that Jackson expertly catches. Styled by Dianna Lunt and orchestrated by Moss Creative, the shoot’s overall aesthetic matches the collection’s feminine sportswear look perfectly.

During the shoot, Sevigny took a couple of minutes to talk about why she appreciates Tomboy’s clean and easy aesthetic. She also informs us of some of her beauty essentials, like the multi-use Rosebud Salve and a “silky, sexy” trench coat. The collection looks super wearable and we look forward to its stateside arrival.

School is closed and you have an entire morning to get lost in the city of New York. You can explore every little crevice or just book it to Central Park and sit on a rock overlooking the lake for the rest of the day. Imagine the possibilities! New York band Nada Surf took a day off and embraced their city’s potential in their latest music video for When I Was Young.

Directed by Phil Harder, When I Was Young takes us through a tunnel of nostalgia for youthful times. The lyrics evoke memories of years long forgotten though fully enjoyed. The video’s protagonist is a ‘fro-ed boy who’s decided to play hooky from school and spend the day having New York City adventures: a walk down Alphabet City to the FDR, a subway ride to Central Park where people make out on strategically placed rocks, and a block’s walk to being smack dab in the middle of Midtown. He climbs a ladder to a roof and has an amazing view of the Empire State Building, bright blue background in perfect place.

A track from their recently released seventh full-length studio album, ‘The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy,’ When I Was Young is a perfect refresher of the classic Nada Surf sound.

Out of context, this video for Father John Misty‘s track, Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings could very well be a documentation of Parks and Rec babe Aubrey Plaza’s average Saturday night. Tearing stuff up, being badass… isn’t that what our favourite Puerto Rican deadpan expert does like, all day?

Plaza describes her role in Hollywood thusly: “I play a crazy person who destroys a funeral.” Very Accurate.

Watch as April Aubrey goes completely batshit: mascara staining her cheeks in full glory and eyes glazing over in a kind of deranged delusion as she absently eats flowers, smokes apple bongs and knocks over everything in sight. We can’t help but imagine that the direction for this video was fairly minimal—all director Noel Paul probably did was say, “Hey Aubrey, go nuts!”, and a suitably distressing sequence of crazy ensued.

So, who is Father John Misty? J. Tillman, former Fleet Foxes drummer has adopted the alias to depart well away from FF and their signature twee, running-through-the-forest-gathering-up-daisies-and-baby-birdies kind of sound, replacing it with something altogether more ambitious and psych-rock. His promising debut is due out May 1st on Sub Pop and if this video is anything to go by, it’ll be absolutely mental.

What do you get when you mix a classy restaurant in Florence with Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman’s 25 closest BFFs? The best dressed room on the planet, basically. There is literally nothing more underrated in the fashion world than the whole other exciting, stylish half that is men’s fashion; we have to thank people like Scott Schuman for bringing elegance back to a century where everyday men’s fashion has largely become a disposable, cheap and thoughtless concept in a world of Made In China and one-wear clothing.

There isn’t a facial hair out of place in this boisterous room of men sharing a hearty meal and pouring over ideas in Schuman’s Lunch for 25— there’s slick hair and glinting watches on wrists, Kanye politely behaving himself in the corner as he gleams in his white suit, an influx of bow ties and twenty five men who honestly care about what they wear and what fashion means to them. It’s partly a shame that this was shot black and white—it does naturally lends itself to the setting (a room absolutely reeking of elegance) but you can only wonder what pops of colour these creative men have worked into their outfits (all the same, the crisp and minimalist lines of every suit jacket in sight are nothing but enhanced in monochrome). Schuman hopes to turn the innaugral Sartorialist lunch into a bi-annual event, where fashionable dudes gentlemen get together and become best friends*. An invite to the lunch would be, in our books, the most ego-boosting fashion bump you could ever get.

*I’m only guessing.

Think of Afghanistan and you’ll be confronted with images of war, violence and danger. Google Afghanistan and you’ll get a toppling news feed of civilian casualties, a war that has left a country distraught for more than ten years, political promises to pull out, grandiose claims that This Will End Soon. Go to Afghanistan and you can witness a country and a people that go deeper and are stronger than their daily hardships; a landscape of arrestingly spectacular mountain ranges and soaring landscapes that are largely untouched; close knit village communities studded with the unblinking eyes of locals.

Lukas Augustin spent two years living in Kabul, undertaking civil service for a humanitarian aid organization between 2006-2008. Last March he had the opportunity to visit again, this time with his camera in tow and an idea to portrait a place whose international perception has been clouded by misfortune. How fundamentally terrible is the typical Western idea of Afghanistan, in which a country is identified more by its tragedies than its triumphs? Augustin strips back this concept by capturing the natural beauty of Afghanistan as well as the kind faces that populate its terrain, sprinkled with vignettes of children cheerfully playing amongst the dust and the dirt; families sitting down for a loud, happy meal eaten with their hands.

As humbling and stunningly shot (on a Canon 5d mark ii and 7d) as the film is, Augustin is careful not to disregard the unfortunate reality of a land pillaged by war. There’s a heart wrenching, intimate moment where a tear slides down a gun-wielding soldier’s cheek; there’s visible hurt in the eyes of men, there’s the film’s dedication to Augustin‘s friend who was shot in the streets of Kabul.

Watch this film and maybe next time you think of Afghanistan you’ll remember the strength of its people and their grinning faces, rather than its sorrow and torment, and instead of its devastating headlines.