The film business has changed a great deal in recent years, with current Cambridge students totally accustomed to 3D or HD movies, downloading via a WiFi connection or watching almost any film of their choice on an iPad. But it hasn't been long since it was all very different. Bruce Willis had hair; films that you missed at the cinema took almost a year to arrive on VHS tape; and after a heavy formal hall, friends would gather in the JCR with the usual 2-for-1 pizza deal alongside ITV's chosen film that night. This has been an incredible period of change in the film and TV industry for me.  Everything from the way films are funded, shot on camera, edited, marketed and consumed has shifted enormously.  While much of this has been driven by technology, it is the way people interact with technology that has caught my eye most, in particular the soaring rise of social media.

Facebook began in 2004, by 2008 it had 100 million users and today in the region of 1.2 billion users; similarly Twitter was launched in 2006, by 2007 averaged 100,000 tweets per month, by 2010 this was 65 million tweets per day, and today generates 400 million tweets a day from its 200 million users!  But what does this mean?

While many of these social networking and communication tools are great for keeping in touch, or finding old friends, it also means we spend a huge amount of time staring at a glowing screen, prodding away at the buttons. This makes being a real friend or engaging in face to face socialising pretty distastrous – a phrase called phubbing has even been coined to describe the phenomenon of people looking down at their phones and ignoring what is going on around them.

As founder of Halyard Productions and a film producer, I decided that a humorous short film might be a fun way to highlight this problem.  My tipping point came when  I observed four girls in a New York restaurant, each of them clutching their devices, preferring to bathe their faces in blue light and communicate with Facebook rather than with one another!

The similarities of social media websites taking over many elements of our lives from photo albums to marketing campaigns resulted in an obvious choice for a film parody: the Terminator movies.  The rise of the machine world and manipulative artificial intelligence was a great framework on which to base a short film about the problems of social media, and from this initial idea came the film “iNET”.  After developing the script, I enlisted the BAFTA winning Special Effects company Blue Bolt to deliver the project’s more ambitious scenes. 

You can read more about iNET and see a teaser video on the Kickstarter website (www.kickstarter.com) by searching for “iNET” or simply type this link into your browser:http://kck.st/18RNuUF.  The title of our project is The Most Ironic Internet Campaign in the World. Of course this is nicely summed up by the fact that we're publishing it here online as both the most effective medium for reaching a big audience, and the very tool the film's heroes battle against.

iNET is a satirical look at the modern use of social media, using humour to communicate some more serious issues. I hope that current and future Cambridge students can both use this technology but maintain a sense of reality and old fashioned relationships that really do make both the movie business and the broader world go round.