A Hit Movie Created With the Product Manager’s Mindset: Searching
by Super Neuro
"If I see your screen, I see your soul.
If I can see your screen, I can see your soul."
——Timo Bekmambitov (producer of the movie "Searching")
The above sentence comes from Timur Bekmambitov, the producer of this year's hit movie "Searching". The movie is currently being released in China and has achieved good results in the three days since its release.
The story tells the suspenseful story of a single father who is a Silicon Valley software engineer and uses online tools to find his missing 16-year-old daughter.
One of the reasons why this movie has received great acclaim this year is that it is a bold attempt.There is no real shot shot by a camera in the entire film.,Instead, there are only recording perspectives of various screens, including: mobile phone screens, computer screens, surveillance cameras, and live TV cameras.
The entire movie is like a cleverly designed, timely, and high-quality product that just happened to occupy the top spots in the "Movie Store" recently.
A low-budget movie that has both great reviews and box office success
"Searching" was first screened on a small scale at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won two awards and was favored by Sony Pictures. It was then released worldwide and has since received rave reviews.
On major rating websites, "Searching" has received rave reviews: Rotten Tomatoes rating is 92%, IMDB rating is 7.8, and METASCORE rating has reached 71.
On Douban, it has a high score of 8.5, which is better than 96%'s suspense film. So far, the global box office of this movie has reached 80 million US dollars.
The director who used a million-dollar budget to support a tens-million-dollar box office is a former Google employee
The most amazing thing is that this movie was shot in just 13 days and had a production budget of less than $1 million, so the current box office results are undoubtedly a win-win for this low-budget movie.
Behind this menacing halo is a talented director Aneesh Chaganty, who first caused a sensation in 2014, when he had not yet graduated from college.
At the time, Anish was studying at the USC School of Cinema. Together with his partner Sefer Ohanian (also the screenwriter of Searching), he used Google Glass to shoot a 2-minute short film called Seeds. After uploading the short film to Youtube, it received over 1 million hits within 24 hours.
This incident attracted the attention of Google, and he joined Google Creative Lab soon after. After joining Google, Anish's main job was to plan, shoot and produce advertisements related to Google products.
It is said that he is good at using the "screen image recording" method to express advertising creativity. He once said: "I try to use the cold and ordinary screen images as a canvas to convey emotions, and try to move people to tears with just a click of the mouse."
After meeting producer Timur Bekmambitov, both were keen on making movies using only screens, so they developed a film project called "Screen Life", which led to the movie "Searching", the first feature film directed by Anish and a product of the "Screen Life" concept.
Before filming the movie, I made a demo using product ideas
At first, "Searching" was just an 8-minute idea, but with the encouragement and support of investors and the brainstorming of screenwriters, it was eventually expanded into a feature film. In order to concentrate on making this film, Anish decisively quit his job at Google.
Anish also made full use of the idea of designing Internet products. Before the filming of the movie, he made a demo of the movie himself.
In traditional film and television projects, some sophisticated and large-investment projects will also design preview films for financing and casting, but they are often animated presentations of storyboard scripts.
But Anish was even more daring. In order to invite more famous actors, he also accepted the advanced creation of "screen performance":Anish personally played all the roles in the film, shot the demo of the film, and sent it to investors and actors he wanted to invite.
Isn’t this the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) often mentioned in product design?
It was also through this method that Anish invited the famous Asian actor John Zhao and attracted his attention with this sincere demo short film.
Asian actors persuaded to act
A good product, in addition to the product manager, also requires the cooperation of technology, design, operations, marketing and other functional departments.
Similarly, behind this film stands a team of directors and screenwriters, who provided the film with an excellent script and logical support, but what presents the film is the leading actors' deep understanding of their roles and their dedicated performances.
John Zhao, the star of "Searching", has gained a large number of fans for his role as Sulu in "Star Trek". The topic of #StarringJohnCho (# lets John Cho be the protagonist) also set off a wave of popularity.
He is also the best Asian actor in Hollywood today, and his role as the leading actor in "Searching" made him the first Asian actor to star in a Hollywood thriller.
However, according to him, when he was first invited to participate, he refused in his heart because he felt that it was strange to use a computer screen to shoot the entire film, and it did not have a "movie feel", and it was also difficult to act without an opponent.
He later said in an interview:"For me, acting is a two-way thing. Only when you are face to face with the actor you are acting opposite, can the most authentic emotional response be fully stimulated."
However, the final presentation of the film is still very smooth and realistic. In addition to the editing effect, it is also inseparable from John's wonderful performance. This movie has also become the pride of John Zhao's career.
Movie review: A real peek into the protagonist's life
In the end, this film, which was shot in 13 days, took a full two years to edit and finally presented the effect we see in theaters now.
The whole movie is like a pseudo-documentary recorded on the screen, although this form is not original. In the 16th episode of the sixth season of the American TV series "Modern Family" and the recent thriller "Unfriended 2: Dark Web", the same non-real shooting, full-screen expression method is used.
In terms of screen shooting, "Searching" can be said to be "crazy". Even the transition between computer desktops is connected by other electronic screens, without any real shooting.
So it creates an illusion that you are staring at someone else's computer screen for 100 minutes. It is indeed a complicated experience to move this method to the big screen. After all, the 22-point font you are familiar with is almost enlarged 50 times and presented on the big screen.
Tracing the web: From Windows to Reddit to live streaming sites
The film begins with a series of quick cuts that explain the background of the story through family records on a computer running Windows XP.
However, the director still "unceremoniously" pointed out the areas where Windows was criticized.
Scene 1: My daughter wants to play a web game. After she opens the game "Infinite Maze", "Ding ding ding ding ding..." explosive pop-up windows fill the screen.
Scene 2: There is an anti-virus software that is conspicuous in the lower right corner of the computer. When the man is looking for information on the old computer, after a long boot time, a reminder pops up saying "You have not run the anti-virus software for 694 days."
This old computer carries the family's memories: the Windows startup sound, the classic blue sky and white cloud desktop, and the large-grained pixel quality all make people miss the XP era.
Geek dad shows off: No privacy on the Internet
The turning point of the story was that the daughter left her Macbook at home. Coincidentally, it had no power-on password. The father successfully cleared all the "levels" through a series of operations on the computer.
Many people may have experienced the way a father hacked his daughter's social media account. Although it is not advanced, it is still very vivid.
He used password recovery to find opportunities layer by layer using the associated email addresses. After several iterations, he found an email address that could be logged in. Thus, the gate of his daughter's social media was completely opened at that moment.
I believe that if you have ever recovered your password, you will definitely smile knowingly at this operation.
Although this operation was forced, it still exposed the security risks of social accounts.
With the help of a computer and the unlocking of one account, almost all accounts can be cracked. The common practice of mutual binding is also the key to cracking at that moment, just like a domino falling, followed by a series of collapses.
A large number of scenes in the movie are the protagonist's video calls on Facetime, and his skillful search operations have always relied on the entire Google family: a large number of Google search applications, Google Drive to organize and share case information, and Google Map to mark key location information.
Until the climax of the plot, in addition to G Suite, more familiar Internet products appeared: Facebook, Yahoo, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, etc., including the currently popular live broadcast sites and video communities.
The information left by the male protagonist's missing daughter on these social networking sites became the only way for the male protagonist to understand his daughter. The constant exploration also made the male protagonist deeply shocked and got closer to the truth step by step.
"Searching": The Internet knows you better than your family
Another clever part of the film is the suspense of its plot. The whole story goes through several twists and turns. The director deliberately laid a lot of foreshadowing and arranged a lot of clever clues in the film.
But I have to tell you bluntly that if you make your own inferences, you will definitely guess the ending wrong.
Regardless, it is a fact that this movie has been a huge success. Overall, "Searching" is a well-made work, but you may have to experience it to know what it feels like to present a desktop movie on the big screen.
