Update 09/03/12

There been a few issues with the resolution of the graphics as I made them slightly too small and now they're pixelated, but its been sorted. That means that we've finished our project and been signed off!

Now its time to draft my evaluation before I'm off to Swanage. When I get back I'll have one week till the evaluation deadline and two weeks till the collective project deadline. It'll be a bit busy during that time but it all should get done in time.

Update 08/03/12

In the media department at school right now and we've just moved on to grading. Its difficult to grade because you need a good eye and be able to match colours confidently. If we all take turns grading then we can reach a general agreement in the end.

The opening sequence looks great so far, I've seen the clip so many times that I've learnt the script. I've been given the task of the creating the graphics on the screen which I've been animating for the whole week during every lesson and free period I've had. The program I'm using is Adobe After Effects which I've only used once before now so theres been a bit to learn, although there are a lot of repeated techniques and effects in the graphics. Generally, animating graphics has been simple but time comsuming. Raef and Anna have been working hard on getting the clips in order, sorting out any music and dialouge problems and a lot more.

At the moment Anna is grading and Raef is in another lesson. I'll be working on evaluation draft now as I'll lose a week due to a Geography field trip to Swanage and an Art exam.

Update 27/02/12

Day after our shoot and I just have a few things to report.

• Overran by a hour so we worked from 8:00am till 6:00pm.
• Set design was finished quickly, although we added a few extra items that were not in the test shoot.
• We've scheduled to film the main hacker shots during thursday lunch time with Robbie Lardi, using the bookcase in one of the class rooms as the background.
• The remaining two hackers  will be filmed during friday lunch time with Natasha Jalonen and Francis Gillen.

Update 25/02/12

Its the day before our real shoot and I'm hoping it'll all go according to plan. We've allocated 9 hours, 8:00am till 5:00pm, an hour longer than our test shoot since we ran out of time. The first two hours will be dedicated to setting up, then after Nico and Francis arrive we'll start filming. There should be plenty of time since most of the room has already been set up. Our lead hacker shots and some of the other hacker shots will be taken at another time.
Posters, whiteboard, curtains, bin bags, bed covers have all been left the same as from last time. This time we'll have more lighting since we noticed that the footage we shot was grainy. Another option we could've taken to solve this problem would've been to use the Sony V1Es that the school had available, but it would take some time to learn how to use the video cameras, so we chose to use more lighting. There will be three lights in total, all with blue filters.

Update 23/02/12

The test shoot has now been edited, although the shots of the computer screen where graphics are supposed to be have been left blank.


Some of things that have noticed and/or changed from the original animatic:

• Two focus pulls of the phone might be waste of time so we removed the first one, that way we can use that time for more varied shots rather than repeats.
• Changed the first typing shot to a still isntead of a pan that we took just in case. We decided to do that because we wanted the action to build up, instead of jumping straight into it.
• We noticed that at the end we had two shots that were from a similar to one another in terms of angle and framing, this was a bit disconcerting to viewers so we got rid of the frame where he looks shocked and simply kept the shot of the hacker taking off the headphones. This made the sequence flow easier.
• I edited and matched the speech of the main hacker to the footage as it was not long enough, we'll have to extend the script in order to fill the time, at the moment there are some gaps in the rough cut where the main hacker is not speaking at all.

Update 07/02/12

After school on Friday, Anna and Raef both helped dress the set ready for the shoot on Saturday. We stuck posters up and chose items we thought suitable for a teenage boy's bedroom. Afterwards I changed the curtains and bed covers to something less feminine.

The next day we put the final touches onto our set; placing mugs, moving tables into place, arranging objects, setting out a plate with biscuits and chocolate, writing code onto the whiteboard, hanging wires from the computer and more. I covered the windows with black bin bags so that unwanted light would not get in the way. Raef brought lighting and we experimented with the filters, trying red, green and yellow before choosing blue which helped with creating the atmosphere for the room. For some of the shots we used an honeycomb grid which focused the light on one point, this was really useful for when we wanted the viewer to focus on something in particular during a shot, for example, the hacker's hands.
 

Soon after we finished setting up and experimenting with lighting, our actors/assistants (Nico and Francis) arrived. After choosing an outfit for Nico and gelling his hair, we were ready to start filming. The shots were equally managed between us, roles such as keeping track of shots, filming, lighting were rotated among us so that everyone had a chance to do a bit of everything.

The shot was successful as we managed to get all our shots taken in the allocated time, despite having to rush slightly at the end. One of the problems I noticed is that if anything needs to be shot again we'll have to retake all the shots as the set design is so unique that attempting to recreate it would almost certainly result in continuity errors.

Update 04/02/12

So we finished our animatic on the Friday before our test shoot. Raef chose some music suitable for opening sequence and we added some titles, using a font we all agreed on, though we might decide to change it later. Anna matched the shots to the beats in the music so that footage and music generates a stronger impact. Movement was added to the frames, something we could not have done with a storyboard.

Creating an animatic has helped us get a gerneral idea of which shots work best and what changes need to be made, for example, we originally wanted a central shot of the hacker's back but after creating the animatic it seemed appriate to change it to a over shoulder shot, focusing more on the screens infront of him. It'll also be easier to edit when we have our test shots captured as we can then match the shots to the animatic frames, then if we notice anything that doesn't work we can change it.

The animatic will be uploaded onto the group blog in a while.

Update 31/01/12

Last week we worked out a shot list and began sketching/outlining frames of our storyboard, we managed to finish this yesterday and began taking photographs of each frame so that we can create an animatic on Adobe Premiere Pro. So far, it has been going smoothly, although we have come up to a total of roughly 53 shots, which means an average of 2 seconds per shot.