Author: Ivy Zhou

Music Selection

The main background music underlying the video is the track “It Catches Up With You”, from the 2010 David Fincher movie “The Social Network”. This is one of my favourite films, despite the large amount of artistic license it takes with Facebook’s origin story and the personality of Mark Zuckerberg, cast here as a social outcast with a lot to prove. I’ve always identified strongly with Mark’s struggle between his loneliness and his loathing of vulnerability. These themes of craving meaningful connection and community were ones that I wanted to also bring to our major video project.

“It Catches Up With You” plays during the scenes where Mark is dealing with the fallout of being socially ostracized for releasing Facesmash, a website designed to empirically rank female students based on their attractiveness by comparing their photos pairwise. Mark had not gotten permissions from the female students to put their photos up, and in any case the website was in extremely poor taste. At this point in the movie, Mark is easily the most hated kid on campus by both staff and students, he’s got a hangover from coding Facesmash while drunk last night, and he’s still trying to grapple with the fact that his longtime girlfriend has broken up with him.

While the scene we’ve chosen to depict in our video project is not nearly as depressing as all of that, I am trying to hint at some kind of stress in the subject of the video, Alice. Clearly, the girl is not happy. Additionally, I like this song for its long drawn out notes and the way that electronic guitar feedback echos in the background. This slows the video down to a pace fitting a depiction of the end of someone’s day, and emphasizes the electronic influences on lives that we’re trying to discuss with this video.

Shooting the Video

The concept of our video was very simple, consisting of essentially only 1 scene in a dimly lit interior room. This made shooting easy, since I didn’t have to juggle locations and I could control lighting very easily. However, I had to pay more attention to continuity than usual because the set is shown from many angles throughout the scene and I had to make sure that in each scene the details like the arrangement of books on the desk, pillows and blanket on the bed, and where the backpack was placed, remained consistent.

The only camera used on the shoot was a OnePlus 6T. This is my personal phone, and it’s a mid-tier Android phone which doesn’t have particularly good camera quality and has no optical image stabilization. This gives most shots a grainy, shaky quality that looks less polished and thus more intimate and authentic, both of which are better for the theme of the video. Furthermore, because of the way that video is edited to long sustained notes in the song, wobbling the camera or changing camera focus gives the viewer something to look at during these still shots.

I included two spiral shots in the shoot, one zooming in and one zooming out at the end of the shot. These are both long shots and are meant to be a visual representation of someone’s life spiraling out of control as well as to build tension in a video that doesn’t have much in the way of a plot.