The social network

I recently watched the social network Then I watched it again and then again and then today I watched it a fourth time. I really love this film which is suprising considering my favourite films are often the ones that are far from realistic, and that is often why I love them so much because they are an escape from actual real life. But the social network is definately an exception being based on real life events. The film actually has near enough nothing to do with my opening but I really wanted to write about it.

A brief outline on what happens; an undergraduate at harvard is recognised as an incredible talented computer programmer after he casually creates a website in one night while drunk that attracts 22,000 veiwers and crashes the entire hardvard network. He is the approached by two fellow students with an idea to create a social networking site which is desirable due to its exclusivity. Mark however has a better idea and while avoiding the other two student goes of and creates the facebook with his best friend Eduardo who provides all the finances needed. It instantly becomes and incredible sucess. In result the two students with the original idea sure Mark for intellectual property theft.
Mark then meets sean, the man who founded napster and he soon becomes Marks idol but he unfortunately guides mark in to conning Eduardo who had always been the co founder of facebook out of his shares and condenses them down to just 0.03%. Eduardo then eventually sues Mark for £600 million dollars.

I think what draws you in most in the film is the character of Mark Zuckerberg. How true to life the Mark in the films character is we will never know but the main character in the films complex mind is just so intresting to watch. From the very first scene the conversation between him in his girlfriend instantly portrays him as an incredibly intelligent man whos mind is built on so much structer and form that he seems to be anylising the world from a completely unique veiw. Being a computer genuis and able to form hundreds oflines of internet coding from the top of his head it almost seems like he has a talent of breaking every scentence spoken to him down, manipulating it and throwing it back out to his advantage. I could talk about his character for hours. I think what really made Marks personality such an important part of the film is the perfectly written script. I know thats more of the english side rather than the media side but its written with so sharply with so much wit and intelligence its so perfect for the film.

As you watch on you notice no recogniseable songs in the soundtrack as it is all entirely instrumental or an orchestra which is another thing I really like about it. Althought its slightly cliche to use music verging on classical in a film about upper class students at harvard, being so subtle and each song suited so well to each scene I think it complimented the film effectively. It also created the atmosphere of something great is going to happen and the feeling of the something being so big and dominant. Which the website 'facebook' is so truthfully portrayed to be.

The actual editing and filming is again I think made to be so perfect. The film rarely has bright colourful summers day scenes and is all set during the winter with heavy shadows and rich deep colours. The story flashes between court cases in the current day and past events leading up to the court cases. Confusing at first but then everything fits so perfectly. I think this actually makes the audience really understand the characters situations in the court cases and really helps sympathise with each person. Being a real life story there is no clear begining middle and end withing the film but just a series of events. Also unlike other fictional films there is no clear sense of who is the victim or the villian. Of course Mark being the main character as you do in most films you subconsciously want him to suceed despite the arguable fact that he has actually comitted theft and conned his best friend out of millions of dollars.

Emmas imagination - This day

I think this video could be quite useful to look at for our opening as it has the sketchy kind of animation we wanted in one ofour credits which didnt really work out. The way the clips flicker I think is really effective and quirky. Also the way in which the objects such as the book travels and the way the shoes dance is really clever and similar to something we could use in our opening as it seems really simple to create by just speeding up clips which we could try and use to make our flying saucer animation work. I really dont like her or the song though and she does look ridiculously squashed.

Another credit

Whilst we were filming we realised one of our credits we originally planned to do wasnt actually going to possible so joely came up with this idea. This will probably be where we put our title.

Opening

Turns out our first shot of our opening didnt really work out too well. It was overall just too dark, a but scruffy and pretty typical for filming in a shop so we refilmed a new opening shot and it works alot better.

Flying saucer credit

We filmed our flying saucer credit by filming many extremely short clips of each shot and paused and moved the objects. However it didnt really work out how we pictured it. As we wanted to make it space themed hense the flying saucers flying through space we decided to film on a black baground nd use strobe lighting. I think what went wrong was the the background was too matte and therefore didnt make the coloursof the flying saucers stand out the way we hoped and also it was all a bit messy. We might try and give it another go but we definately wont be using this.#

Music

For our opening a big part of what we hoped to make it funny was the song we decided to use as firstly it would be the last song you expect our character to be listening too as we portray her to be a sweet kind innocent girl. It also means her dancing would be horrificly out of time and not appropriate to the song which is quite serious and sexually explicit. It also subverts stereotypes hopefully making it a bit different which is exactly what we've been aiming for with our whole opening as majorty of the entries will be about a scary stalker chasing an outof breath victim whos running through the woods being filmed by a shaking camera to create that amazing running effect then oh no she falls and in to the close up shot of the victims horrificly screaming. Back to the point we we're worried that we would loose marks due to copyright and so we contacted one of the examiners and the results were good !

Filming

So we finally got round to filming and took out trip to the sweet shops rather nervously. Luckily all was fine and we were pretty much able to do everything we originally planned. We threw in some new ideas on the spot for example we couldnt fdo some of the originally planned credits and came up with a few new ideas.


Overall the shots we managed to get were exactly what we wanted but we did have some trouble with things such as lighitng and time.

Credits

We decided that we would have seperate slides for majoirty of our credits and came up with some really creative ideas of how to do them using the theme of sweets and quirky animation.
One idea we have is to use stawberry laces and film someone creating a credit out of them with their hands and then speed it up and use it between a shots of the girl in the sweet shop. The shot would look similar to this filming just the hands. This opening is also in the same genre as our opening and was a big inspiration when we were coming up with ideas.


Another idea we have is to use a similar style shot but create the credit out of a handful of jelly beans scattered on the floor as this also fits in woth a part of our characters actions working in the shop as she drops a bag of jelly beans. We think this will flow nicely and look really good.

We also want to create another credit by using sherbet and then blowing it away. Similar to this video at 19 seconds and again at 21 seconds. We will also do another credit using the same idea but reversing the film to create the effect of the sherbet beign thrown down and creating the credit. 



Another idea we have is to creating a still image animation where by taking lots of picutes and putting htem togetehr they create a sketchy rough kind of old style animation which we think would be perfect for our opening for this we are going to use flying saucers.

Storyboarding

In preparation for our filming we began to storyboard. We did this by drawing, as best as we could, each single shot on to a flash card and just noting on the back. which was most definately needed with the awful illustrations I produced!


PHOTO OF STORYBOARD

Planning

We visited the sweet shop and then again a second time. Although it wasn't the smoothest of trips we finally got the go ahead and were told we could use the shop to film the following monday.

This is pretty much an exact image of the shop we are going to film in. The location is absolutely perfect for the idea we have. The authentic and traditional feel to the sweet shop really adds to the quirky character of our opening. The colours and arrangments within the shop will hopefully make for some really good shots.

Trip to the bfi

We went on trip the BFI on southbank in central london to a media confrence based on our course. The confrence consisted of various presentations and talks on the media industry and the kind of work it involves.