Textual analysis of film poster

Textual analysis of film poster

The film poster that I will be reviewing is from the film “The Social Network”. The film was released in 2010, it is categorised as a biography and drama film, it is directed by David Fincher who is an American film director, he was nominated for an academy award for best director for his directing of The Social Network. The Social Network ended up winning 3 oscars and another 149 other wins and 111 nominations, the film was overall rated as very good, a lot of people when to go see the movie, it made £2,486,454 in the U.K on the opening weekend and in total $96,917,897 in gross in the USA, part of the reason why so many people went to go see it was thanks to its  great advertising, and a big part of its advertising was its poster which is regarded as a great poster, it was in IMDB’s list of 20 best film posters of the last 10 years.

The Social Network - Poster

Just to give a little context The Social Network is a biography film of Mark Zucherberg and how he created the website called Facebook. Facebook has become one of the biggest and most used websites of all time and this film is about its creation.

Facebook logo

Mark Zucherberg

The Social Network Poster is quite simple, but it definitively does draw in the audience and grasps their attention. The poster shows the Main character (Mark Zucherberg) played by Jesse Eisenberg who looks like Mark Zucherberg. The poster has the same layout as a lot of film posters, a close-up shot of a face where the eyes can easily be seen, with text that is easily readable over the top of the face and which is in a colour witch catches the viewers attention, mostly white. This layout is commonly used in the film industry for posters.

              Elysium (2013)                                                          Salt (2010)                                                            Thor (2011)

The poster has the same layout as the website the movie is about, Facebook. This and the character which looks like Mark Zucherberg, tells the audience what the film is about but with out giving to much away. The Facebook banner brings a level of familiarity to the audience because Facebook is probably something the audience looks at everyday, so when the audience see’s something they recognise they are drawn in. The obvious target audience for this film is users of the website Facebook, and that is a large percent of the population so it is safe to assume it will draw in a large audience.

Facebook layout on poster.

The character in the poster looks like he is looking at a computer screen because of the lighting on his face which looks electronic and bright and the little square of light in the characters eyes, also the character's blank expression as if he is sitting at a computer, this once again hits at the plot of the film because it is about Facebook and the internet.

Finally, the text on the poster says “You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. The text is written in different fonts (mostlly “Bebas Neue”) and different sizes, but all very large, it is also written in a bright colour (white), all this draws the audiences attention to the poster to read what is written. The meaning behind the tag line is that face book has an immensely large amount of users, at the point of the movie around about half a billion users which is about 15% of the worlds human population, they are calling these Mark Zucherberg’s friends because he created this website that everyone is using, and it says that you cannot get to that level of success without making a few enemies. This draws in the audience and they will want to see the movie and find out how he makes these enemies.

Writing & Font used on The Social Network Poster

Too conclude, this poster draws in the the viewer to the poster in various different ways, it also gives the viewer a sense of familiarity, so the audience is drawn to the poster and then see something they like and they recognise and are interested in, and this will lead the viewer to go watch the movie; So the poster full fills its job of convincing the audience to go watch the film.

Camera Class 2

Camera Class 2

PART 1

Last Thursday (25th of September) Mike (my teacher) brought us back to the film room for another camera class with Matt and Paul. There was camera set up next to a monitor which was showing what could be seen on the camera screen, so that we could see what was being filmed. Matt got on the floor with the camera and a phone in the shape of a Ferrari car. He showed us how if the car phone was driving in one direction down a line, the camera had to stay on one side of the line because if we took one shot where the car was moving it and we were filming from the left side and then another shot of it moving on the right side then it would look like there were two cars driving in opposite direction rather than one car driving in one direction. This is called the “180 degree rule”.

The “180 degree rule” creates some sort of an imaginary axis between the camera and the actors/objects being filmed. The camera should stay on one side of that axis (180 degrees of the full circle which is on the axis, hence the 180 degree rule) and the actors/objects on the other, if the camera were to cross the axis and go to the other side then it would look like suddenly the actors/objects have switched positions, the actors/objects on the left would now appear to be on the right and the actors/objects on the right would appear to be on the left. This is done to allow audience to never get confused as to where the actors are situated on the set and in relation to each other.

180 degree rule (diagram)

The 180 degree rule is followed in most films because the director does not want to to confuse the audience, it simply makes sense and looks a lot better, if a Director were too not follow the 180 degree rule then it would be quite some awkward cuts which would leave the audience disorientated and lost in terms of the characters positioning.

His Girl Friday (1940)

In some instances though some directors decide to break the 180 degree rule on purpose to possibly give across a certain effect. One director who was notorious for often breaking the rule was the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, he apparently did this because he wanted to make his films different from the norm and to try and trick the audience and make them feel tricked for comedic reasons or to ease tension. A famous movie which had a breaking of the 180 rule was The Shinning, Stanley Kubrick broke the rule to try and give across a surreal feeling in the scene.

Late Spring (1949)

The Shining (1980)

PART 2

Later on in the class, Matt and Paul brought back out the tripods and camera’s from the last class we had with them. Are challenge was to shoot a short simple clip which included many of the shots we had learnt in class with Mike. 

Long Shot (LS)

Medium Shot (MS)

Extreme Close Up (ECU)

Close Up (CU)

The scene which my group decided to film was of a girl going up to a chair from out of shot, then she lifts her foot up onto a chair, does up her shoelaces on one shoe, and then walks out of shot. We used a Long Shot (LS) for when the girl was walking up to the chair so that we could see her whole body and the untied shoe, we used a Mid Shot (MS) for when the girl was bending down, we then used a Big Close-Up (BCU) of the shoe and the shoe laces being tied, next a Close-Up (CU) of the girls face while she was tying the shoe and then finally a Medium Long Shot (MLS) of the girl walking out of the shot.

To conclude, in the class my knowledge of the 180 Degree rule was refreshed and put to the test which I found useful and helpful because it had been a while since I had looked at the technique. Then we also got to actually film shots that we had learned about in class, this was nice because it was the first time we were really filming something with the school camera’s, we could actually see how footage filmed with the camera turned out which was nice to finally see.