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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Second Pitch Treatment

After receiving an amber light after our first pitch, we needed to rethink our idea and prepare for our second (and hopefully final) pitch. This is our adapted treatment to fit our new idea:

After presenting this, we got our long-awaited green light and were ready to get started.

23/01/2012 Meeting

In this meeting we were given the idea of having the protagonist in a large online hacker community which is led by a skilled, expert hacker. Our protag isn't very experienced compared to the others in his group and this would be seen a "coming of age" film where our protag matures as a person in order to help his friends. This is the suggestion we received about the basic plot of our opening sequence combined with some of our own ideas:

• The opening sequence starts with close ups of our protagonist, rookie hacker and his room. We’ll see his hands typing on the keyboard, a table cluttered with mugs and crumbs indicating, ears covered by headphones etc. On his screen we’ll see that he is talking to people through an instant messenger while on webcam.
• Some shots of his fellow hackers shown from our protagonist’s point of view (from the webcam) appear in between the close ups. One could be eating their breakfast, another could be sitting in the park, using their laptop and someone could be listening to music. There should be people of all sorts of race, gender, age, location.
• One of the webcams shown will be of the lead hacker, it will be made obvious that he is the leader because he will be the only one talking; the rest of the hackers will be contacting each other through instant messenger while the leader instructs them.
• Through the webcam we then see a figure come behind the leader, we see the figure strike the leader and then then his webcam goes blank.
• The group is panicking; they're asking each other what’s going on through the chat.
• We cut to the protagonist in front of his computer, he's in shock from what’s just happened, sweat dripping down his forehead and trembling slightly.
• The protagonist takes off his headphones to hear a sharp knocking on his door and the sequence ends at this cliff-hanger.