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

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.

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)

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.