This Blog is Now Closed

After a lot of hard work, we've finally completed our project. Please take a look around and enjoy watching our finished opening sequence!

Audience Feedback

• Everyone was able to name the title of the film.
• All audience members were able to identify the genre as thriller, action, sci-fi, or a combination of all three.
• All audience members successfully identified the target audience
• Most were able to identify our protagonist and the boss hacker

• Many people liked the music in the sequence; they felt it really help to establish the genre and build tension
• Many people also want to know "if the kidnapped guy is alive and what happens next."
• The audience were also impressed with the graphics, claiming that they look "realistic" and "really professional - conveys the message really well"
• One of the main points of improvement was the attack of the boss hacker.

"kidnap could be more realistic/sudden"
"the attack at the end could be clearer and more exciting"

Paperwork Evidence

Here is the Equipment Release form we filled out in order to collect the equipment we needed for our shoots and our shoot schedule. This contains the details of each shoot we planned, with signed permission from our teachers.

Grading

One of our inspirational films in terms of grading was Die Hard 4. From looking at this trailer, it is clear that our blue-tinted grading shares similarities with this film. For example, the shot at 0:06 of the man typing uses a cold, blue tint to suggest a sci-fi sub-genre, the same as ours.



Twilight, though a very different genre, shares our blue-tinted look. In this case, it is used to create a sense of mystery, something we have done in our sequence.

The Group at Work

Here are some photos we took while we were editing our opening sequence:

Jeng working on our sequence

Raef and Anna working on the titles

Paperwork Evidence

Here we have our two editing schedules, panning over our 2 weeks of editing. These allowed us to plan out in advance how much time to set aside for editing.

This is just one of many shot logs. This was used when shooting to keep track of how many takes were filmed of each shot, and during the capturing process to note down which shots were best and what we needed to reshoot.

This is one of our very early shot lists:

Audience Feedback Analysis

x axis: Mark out of 10

y axis: Frequency

I just made this bar chart to give a clear representation of how the audience feedback session went. The audience members were of both genders, between the ages of 14 and 18. This bar chart shows the frequency of each mark out of 10.

Audience Feedback

Here are a few examples of the audience feedback forms we received after our screening. We chose the questions specifically to find if our film appealed to the audience we aimed to attract, what worked well and what could be improved. We colleted roughly 25 questionnaires after the film screening.

Behind the scenes - setting up Test shoot

Here's a sample of what went on behind the scenes.

Props on Shoot

We have a lot of props in our sequence because we needed to heavily dress the set to make it look like a teenage boys (hackers) room. Also we added all the different little miscellaneous props in order to try and build a deeper character profile. This was achieved as even though you don't see 'n00b' in his normal life, you can tell what kind of things he gets up to in his spare time.

Main props were:

• Lots of wires
• Lava lamp
• Glasses for 'n00b'
• Two computer screens
• Lots of posters
• Miscellaneous objects such as:
• -Rubix cube
• -Mushroom toy from the game Mario
• -Lego toys (arranged around computer)
• CD holder (with CDs)
• Mobile Phone
• Clothes to scatter around room
• Half drunken glasses of drink to spread around room
• Half eat biscuits and chocolates and snacks to spread around room
• Whiteboard to write computer code on
• Books scattered around room

Our Titles

We designed our titles with the purpose of being easy to read, but fitting in with our hacking theme at the same time. To make these titles synergetic, we made them a similar green to the text on the hacking screens shown. This colour stands out well on the black background that we chose at the beginning of our sequence for our main title. The green and black colour scheme is widely recognisable as the colours seen in hacking, especially in other movies. I was careful when placing the titles to choose a spot that would not distract from the action, but at the same time would be clear and easy to read. The separate words each line up to emulate the structure of the lines of code we see in the sequence. Here are a couple of examples of the titles we used:

We made these titles using a program on the Mac called 'Livetype'. On this program we added a scrolling letter and number effect with a motion track downwards. We also added an overlay to create a sunburtst-like effect. We made the effect reasonably fast as we did not want it to distract from the footage. Also we had to make everyword as a seperate title so that we could try out different placements.

Our main 'GLITCH' title uses a vertical binary texture with a flickering letter effect in order to create a feel of a 'Glitchy' computer. To exit we used a 'TV off' effect. All of our titles are green to simulate the hacking boxes in the sequence.

Graphics

Graphics were constructed in Adobe Photoshop using shape and vector tools, it was then transfered to Adobe After Effects where we animated them. This was fairly simple to do but extremely time consuming. Problems such as pixelation were found later on and had to be fixed resulting in a slight delay on finishing the product.

Set Design; Before & After

Here is a picture of the desk before and after dressing the set. Main differences in set:

• Blue lamp removed
• Extra screen
• Wires
• Poster
• Mouse mat
• Whiteboard

Actors

Actors were purposely chosen to fulfill a range of gender and ethnicity roles.We wanted to support the stereotype of hackers by having a protagonist who conformed to it while challenging it at the same time by showing a wide range of hackers, signifying that anyone could be a hacker, regardless of gender, age and ethnicity.

Equipment List

This is a list of all the equipment used on our shoot:

• 1 x Canon HDV HV30
• 1 x Blazzeo 600w/s
• 2 x Blazzeo 180w/s
• 3 x Blue gels (light filters)
• 1 x Clapperboard
• 1 x Shoot-through umbrella
• 1 x Reflective umbrella
• 3 x Light stands
• Spare Batteries
• Spare Tapes
• Headphones
• Mic (shotgun)
• Tripod
• Bin bags (used to block out light from windows)
• 5 in 1 reflector
• Barn doors for lights
• Honeycomb grid for lights

Bin bags used to block out light from windows

Lighting

This is a video of our lighting setup.

Poster

In order to attract students from our school to our screening, we produced a poster, bearing in mind that it would be stuck up around in a busy school where students are unlikely to stop and read signs on the walls.

The title of the film is clearly stated in the centre of the poster, with a location, time and date underneath is clear bold font making it easy to read. The background has some simple green code fading into black, this is done so that it does not draw the eye away from the important information while making the technological theme obvious.

We positioned the posters strategically, putting more posters in areas where older students passed by, such as outside the Sixth Form common room, and less where younger students passed by, like the Year 7 and 8 Form room corridors, since our film is not aimed at a younger audience. Younger students were still welcome to come, but we did not expect too many of them to turn up.

Social Networking Promotion

By using Web 2.0 we were able to attract our audience to the preview. Facebook is a popular social networking site used many of those in our target audience age group 16-24. Therefore, it is suitable platform for us to advertise on and it meant that we could get a broad reach within our audience.

Our Film Title

Our intial brainstorm

In the first stages of planning, we chose the name 'Cortex Code' as our film title. This was because, at this point, our film was centred around the themes of hacking and brain control. We google searched words to do with the brain, and 'cortex' was a word that most people would recognise as being a part of the brain. 'Code' was referring to the hacking side of the film. Sticking with this theme, we decided to name our fictional production company 'Synapse Productions'. We kept this name even after we adjusted the story.

Once we changed the plot of the film, we needed a new title. Taking inspiration from a previous project in media, we decided to name our film 'Glitch' due to it's computer theme. We like the fact that it is a one-worded, short, snappy name that the audience will remember.

Blog Design

Seeing as we are making our opening sequence centred around the theme of hacking, I decided to design our blog around this theme.

I have used a gif as our background, which I think really makes our blog look interesting. The colour scheme is very simple, as I don't want to distract the reader from the content of our blog.

The font I have chosen for the blog matches the font in the background gif and is a typical computer-style font.

Designing the blog also served as a form of research, as I was able to explore iconic computer colour schemes and fonts in preparation for the graphics in our opening sequence.

Synapse Productions and Touchstone Pictures

Synapse Productions

• Fictional production company that we think could be compared a company called Screen Gems who are an American movie production company and subsidiary company of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group.
• Synapse Productions would tend to produce films with more quirky and mature themes.

   Touchstone Pictures

• Part of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures group.
• We chose them as they tend to distribute films typically with more mature themes and darker tones than those usually distributed by Walt Disney.
• They also did a marketing scheme with the film 'I am number 4' in which they created an online treasure hunt that took you through and made you sign up to social networking site like facebook and twitter on which you had to find clue and solve riddles. I think this would be suitable for our film as it is largely based around computers and the treasure hunt style activity could be themed more to do with hacking.

Useful site

Found a useful site called hackertyper.net that generates random hacking code as you press random keys, we can draw lines of convincing generic code from this and use it in our opening sequence titles. By doing this we'll save time looking for more code. Here is an example of the type of code it provides.

Target Audience Research

Target Audience Profile:

Age: 16-25

Gender: Male

Nationality: British and American

Lifestyle: Students and young adults who spend large amounts of their free time engaged in technology (watching TV, gaming, surfing the internet) and listening to music.

Tastes in media:  action/sci-fi/thriller films

Film Consumption Habits: will visit the cinema, but prefers to watch films from home, via either TV or DVD/Blu-ray

One of our secondary audiences is females of the same age group. This audience would be drawn to the movie because of the secondary female characters and the male hero character.

As technology fans, our target audience are likely to keep up to date on the latest technology, such as Blu-ray players and HD/3D TVs. This would hopefully make the film very successful on its Blu-ray release.

The UK Film Council says that teenagers are the most frequent cinema goers - 40% of teenagers go to the cinema at least once every month. Targeting this audience is a wise move as they are the easiest audience to reach, and as a group, we can easily understand what appeals to this group.