Roughcut

We finished our roughcut! The only parts missing from our roughcut is our graphics, these are a fairly long process to create, so they are being worked on all the time. That aside, I am very happy with our test edit and I think our teachers are too. They gave us a few pointers, such as that we need to have a bit more movement of our rookie hacker as the whole sequence is fairly static. We also needed to change the ordering of a few shots at the beginning as they were drawing the eye in but then back out again which ruined the flow of the cut. Also, our images were a bit grainy, so I will be using more light this time in order to prevent this. We have schedueled a shoot for this sunday, so hopefully it all goes as well as last time if not better.

Planning Progress and Start of Test Shoot Set up

Over this last week we have been working on and now completed our storyboard and animatic. We have been busy drawing out shots on various coloured sticky notes to represent different types of shots. We then took a picture of each of these and put them into adobe premier in order to make the storybard picture into what is effectively a non-moving image version of our piece. After having finished this i am confident with our idea and the style of our 'Action style' hacking should work really well.

We are picking up equipment today to take to Jengs house where we are going to do some prep for the shoot tomorrow like some basic set design.

Test Shoot

It's now Sunday and snowing! I am really happy with how our test shoot went. We arrived at the house early and we heavily dressed the set. I think our set design worked really well and was fairly easy for us to imagine it before as we are all teeneagers and know how messy our rooms can get. We spent about an hour doing this and we also set up some lighting. I had brought some lights along with various filters and such, we ended up using a blue filter on one light and nothing else. We also had the window blacked out with bin bags so we coulf fully control the lighting. I was mainly in charge of lighting as they were my lights and i felt this to be a strength of mine. Anna took role as chief organiser, she was fillin in sheets, keeping to time and making sure everything was going as planned. As this was Jengs house, she sort of took charge in where we should go, what areas would be easy to film etc. We all shared the filming equally and we had great actors called Nico and Francis. Each of us stepped in for a bit of acting aswell.

All in all this was a successful shoot.

Adjustments to Sequence Idea

Since I last posted on here, we had a meeting with our group and our teachers yo rethink a few ideas. All the problems we previously had have now been solved. I personally am happy with th new opening sequence adjustments. We had an idea that our hacker can communicating to other hackers via webcam as he is hacking, so its like they are a hacking team.

Feedback and Responses from our Treatment/Pitch

There were a few basic but important issues that arose when we got out feedback:

• Fisrt of all we had far too much going on in our opening sequence to fit into 2 minutes of cinematic style sequence.
• We also realised that we hadnt researched enough into our special effects to know if it would be possible to complete the special effects in the time we have for this project
• The setting would be too small to try and choreograph a safe and effective fight scene
• We also hadn't decided about music, we knew what sort of music we wanted but we hadn't researched actually what music we were gong to use.
• We also had not decided how we were going to do our titles
• Having a gunshot was just over the top, we wanted it to have another special effect but it is just not realistic in terms of our given circumstances.
• We were told it would be too hard to dress the set, but we think we will be able to do it with enough time
• probably our biggest issue was that we needed to make our plot for the rest of the film and it needed to be revised as we revised our opening sequence

Behind the scenes Shoot

This is the progress of us setting up and getting lighting sorted. Enjoy

Lighting for our shoot

This is the type of lighting we were aiming for. Below is a video where I explain my lighting on our test shoot.