Genre/Character Research: Teen Action Heroes

I've done a bit of research into teenage action movie heroes, specifically male, as this is what we have planned for our protagonist.

Peter Parker (Spiderman):


Peter Parker is an unlikely hero, not too dissimilar from our own protagonist. Parker is a shy, nerdy high-school student who is, essentially, just a normal young man. They are both underestimated by those around them.

Though these are all similarities, the main difference between Parker and our Rookie Hacker is the origin of their abilities. Peter Parker gained his abilities by accident, without his awareness. Our protagonist's abilities are purely down to him teaching himself and his own natural flair. I think this represents our character as a diligent, hardworking person. His abilities are also vastly more believable: his strengths lie in his own intelligence. I believe that this element of normalcy (at least in comparison with Spiderman) will allow the audience to relate to his character on a much more personal level, which will make sure that the audience roots for him throughout the movie.

Our protagonist and Parker share some visual similarities - they both wear glasses and plain, casual clothes.

Other Hackers in Films

These two are characters from the film 'Hackers'. The male character follows the typical 'look' for a typical hacker. He is not particularly good looking, he has a headset on with a mic that looks very technologically advanced.
The Female charcter played by Angelina Jolie is not a typical looking hacker, she is young female and good looking, but using make up and dress they have made her look more 'geeky' and 'weird' in that what she is wearing is very strange.

Breakdown of our Sequence

0 - 10:  film title, shots of lava lamp
10 - 20: hacker typing and drinking. Shot of screen.
20 - 30: hacker eating, then scrunching up paper and throwing in bin
30 - 40: boss hacker voice over
40 - 50: webcam shots, mobile phone focus pull
50 - 1.00: webcam shots, rookie hacker.
1.00 - 1.10: webcam shots, hacking window
1.10 - 1.20: access denied, rookie asks for help
1.20 - 1.30: rookie gets disk and moves back to computer
1.30 - 1.40: puts disc into computer, begins executing polymorphic
1.40 - 1.50: access granted
1.50 - 2.00: boss hacker taken out, webcam cuts out
2.00 - 2.10: rookie pushes back from computer, takes headphones off and hears knock on door

Titles Research

Titles are a vital part of an opening sequence. They provide institutional information and help to establish the film genre through their font and colour.

Edward Scissorhands

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Coraline

Here are a few films that we thought had very interesting titles. We were particularly interested in the way they were placed in relation to the other elements on screen. The difference in font also highlighted the importance of individual and iconic titles. We want our titles to be recognisable, yet easy to read.

Rough Cut Feedback

• Music- we need to make sure that it doesn't drown out our dialogue when we come to editing our final cut.
• Lighting- some of our dark shots are too grainy. We need to light our set better for our actual shoot. This is why we are using a larger number of lights.
• We are going to switch the lava lamp shot and the keyboard shot at the very beginning of the sequence, as before we brought the audience into the action only to pull them back out again. The new order of shots sorts this problem out.
• The main hacker attack shot needs tighter framing, and we need to make sure not to reveal the attacker's face.
• The end of the sequence needs to be more scary- for example, we need our rookie hacker to jump when the door knocks.
• We need to rescript for 5 characters.
• Add some more shots of the rookie hacker moving (throwing rubbish in bin, getting CD from across room)

Shot list that will be used for main shoot

There are several changes:

• removed the last "shocked" shot as the angle it was shot from was similar to the "taking off headphones" shot and they didn't work very well together.
• removed the first phone focus pull, two focus pulls was too much.
• added some "extra" shots because we feel as though we need more movement in the opening sequence, just to add some variation.

Shot list used for the test shoot

Rough Cut

This is our rough cut. This is simply a rough version of our sequence, which allowed us to spot any complications we may not have foreseen in order to make our real shoot go as swimmingly as possible. A key thing we learnt from this was that our footage was too grainy - we needed to do something about our lighting! This knowledge proved itself to be very useful.

Mind map

This is a mind map drawn out in the very early stages of our project. At this point, we had chosen the 'computer hacking' theme and had a basic plot and character. 

Animatic

After creating our post-it note storyboard, we photographed each shot and used Premiere Pro to create our animatic. We found that this really helped us to visualise our sequence. We were able to spot any continuity issues in advance of our shoot, and it helped us to make sure we had a fair distribution of shot types.

Test Shoot

On Saturday we all went to Jeng's house and had our test shoot, which lasted from 8:00am to 4:00pm. The shoot went very well and we got all our shots on time. Now to edit our rough cut!

Storyboarding

We created a storyboard using a large piece of paper and several differently coloured post-it notes. Using post-it notes means we are able to make changes to the storyboard easily. Drawing a storyboard gives us our first insight to how our opening sequence will look like.

Hacking film research 3

The Matrix scene is here for two main reasons, it has an absolutely brilliant set design, which is what we were discussing wanting to do in our meeting, and it has very good on screen visuals.

Hacking Films Research 2

The Masterminds hacking scene has some good camera angles and movements. There are a lot of shots i could imagine being replicated with our project. Again this is not in terms of what is on the screen, but in terms of the sweeping shots across the keeyboard and then close ups of his face showing immense concentration.

Hacking film research 1

The social network scene I have selected is sort of what I envision the style of the hacking being similar to, not in the sense of what is on the screen but the way he is mentally logging everything he is doing by saying it as he is going along. I know in that clip that he writes it on a blog aswell, but i can imagine our hacker almost narrating what he is doing.