David Fincher's The Social Network Will Be The First Feature Film Shot And Projected In 4K?
/Film reader Jimmy W attended the RED Camera convention in Vegas this week, and got a chance to check out all the new awesome cameras they are working on. But the most interesting bit of information he learned had to do with David Fincher's upcoming adaptation of The Social Network.
While there, they screened some never before seen footage of Fincher's The Social Network and Soderberg's Knockout (which all looked spectacular). Recently AMC, Regal and a few other theatres purchased something like 12,000 digital 4K projectors which will be in theatres this year. After showing the footage, RED announced that The Social Network will be the first feature film to be shot in 4K resolution and PROJECTED in 4K resolution. I thought you might dig this since it's some cool tech stuff as well as film news. By the way, we saw some 4K projection there...it's pretty phenomenal. Can't wait for the theatres to have this.
For those of you who don't know, there are basically two different types of digital projection in theaters: 2K and 4K. The numbers are in reference of the resolution. 2K's resolution is 2048×1080, while 4K is 4096×2160. So 4K is almost four times the resolution of 720p High Definition (which is 1280×720 pixels).
I've been lucky enough to see 4K projection a few times, at ShoWest in Las Vegas and at LucasFilm, but the features I've seen on the equipment has always been a lower resolution source or a movie shot on film. For example, while Knowing, District 9, The Lovely Bones, and Gamer were shot in 4K on the Red One camera, they were distributed in 2K resolution. And yes, there have been many tech demos showing what 4K projection can do, but this appears to be the first time a feature will have been both shot and projected in 4K. And best yet, you might even get to see it projected in 4K at one of your local multiplexes.
Previously:
The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield and Joe Mazzello. Columbia Pictures has given the film a rumored $47 million budget. Based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, The Social Network tells the story of Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Facebook. The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, and the 162-page first draft has been described as "Unpredictable, Funny, Touching and Sad."
Here is the official description from the 272 page book :
Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university's Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order. Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.
What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo's and Mark's different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.
The book is available on Amazon for $16.50 ($25 cover price). The Social Network will hit theaters on October 1st 2010.