Rerecord

Rerecord

Finally, a date we are planning to record. The whole thing this time. Well, at least all the news reporter parts. We are planning to record on Monday, April 3. We are super behind and we are freaking out. Unfortunately I had to go out of town this weekend and next weekend so that is really holding us back. As soon as we recod we are going to move straight into editing and start utalizing our class time. The fact that we have nothing scares me to death. I can not believe we procrastinated so much. I also worry about the CCR because I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about and I shudder when I talk for a long time. I may write myself a script so I can read off of it when I am recording my voice. I think I'm going to only record my voice because if I record myself with a camera I will become obsessed with the way I look in the video and that is obviously not the focus of the video.

Blue snowball

Blue snowball

   In our last recording, we noticed that you could barely hear my voice. It might have been because I'm not loud in general, but it also sounded low quality. So, we are going to use something called a Blue Snowball. Blue snowball is a microphone that captures "studio-quality audio for vocals, music, multimedia production, and gaming" according to the microphone's website. We will place the microphone on our lap when we record so that the camera will be unable to see it. It will still be able to pick up our voices perfectly so we are able to match the camera recording with the microphone recording. If we are able to get all three of us in sync, this will improve out opening by so much.
 











http://www.bluemic.com/products/snowball/

redo

redo

So, we decided that we hate the recording we already did. I didn't look or sound like a news reporter. We want to just restart the whole thing. We wanted to meet today after school, but since Blake's house is unavailable due to personal circumstances, we can't. We are still working out scheduling issues, but we have a clear idea on what we want to change.

 I will wear a black dress instead something like the one to the left. It is plain, nice, and simple. Just like news reporters wear. Also I need to memorize the script to perfection. I stuttered a lot during our first shoot and we can't come to like it. The hardest part is, all three of us need to be in sync with each other in order for the jump cut to look and sound good. We have been slacking and we defiantly need to get this movie opening rolling.

costumes

costumes

 We have four characters in our film opening. The three news reporters and the hacker. There is one girl reporter and two guys. The girl part was already filmed so I will focus on the other three. For the news reporters, we are thinking a formal kind of look. Im hoping it turns out to look as sophisticated as Matt Lauer always does. I choose Matt because he is my favorite news report of all time.  I'm really hoping that Blake and Joel look as good as he does. This will make it seem as if they are actually in a news studio which will make the situation more realistic for the audience.
    For the hacker I'm obviously going for a totally different style. For me the typical hacker has to look really creepy. I'm thinking either dark gray for black hoodie is the perfect look for our guy. I want the audience to be unable to recognize the hacker unless they look straight on. This gives the element of suspense until the last second when they actually see his face. The picture to the right is actually the perfect example of the image I have in my head. The creepier this guy looks, the better.

Anonymous

Anonymous

 My group still has not met to film the rest of our short film. I decided to do a little more research on the hacker. We have not filmed that part yet so this will defiantly benefit me.Anonymous is one of the most well known group of hackers in the world. This group has completed many extreme hacking events over the years including attacks on government, major corporations, financial institutions, etc.

        The group gained national attention in 2008 when they hacked the church of scientology. Anyone who wants to be in this group can be. If you say you are in the group that means you are in the group. Most members of the group remain unknown.  There are only 7 anonymous hackers who have been "unmasked". Most of the time when members draw "law enforcement fire" they loose their anonymity as a result.  

         This group has no specific goal. They want to combat censorship, promote freedom of speech, and counter government control. There is three major ways that they hack information. They crash web servers,  leaking private information, and website defacement. In our film, the hacker is hacking web servers and leaking private information. Even though our hacker may not be apart of anonymous, the two are very similar so this research was very beneficial. 

http://abcnews.go.com/US/worldwide-hacker-group-anonymous/story?id=37761302

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/anonymous-hackers_n_3398282.html

Nerve

Nerve

On July 27,2016 Nerve opened in theaters. It's a thriller about an online game where people can choose to be a player or a watcher. Players accept dares from watchers. The game collects all of the players personal data explains three rules. 1: all dares must be recorded on the players phone in order to earn the money. 2: The player will loose all money that was won if they don't do a dare. 3: Players can not report anything to the police. As the movie goes on, the main characters go toothier hacker friends trying to shut the game down. After multiple failed attempts, they modify the source code and reveal everyones code name. This causes everyone to quickly log out of Nerve which finally shuts it down.
   This movie has a modern twist on hacking. It shows how the internet effects teenagers lives by making them act dumb to impress people. This relates to my topic of hacking in a different way.  In my movie, the hacker is bad. In this one, the hackers were good. I used it for reference because it is easier to come up with ideas for how things should look with inspiration from a similar topic.

work work work

work work work

 Today we were supposed to meet again. Due to personal complications, we had to change it to tomorrow. Instead, today I decided to research a bit more about editing techniques.  When we are switching between news reporters, we are going to have to edit in a ton of jump cuts. I am the actual worst at editing. Hearing that I have to figure out how to make all the news people sound good while switching between them sounds super hard to me. I started going from website to website trying to find all the best techniques to make my life a bit easier and less stressful. I learned that you are trying to make it seem like the first person transformed into the other people. In order to do that, you must make sure all of the people are in the exact same position. They all need to be facing the camera. If they are facing somewhere else, it will make it seem like they are talking to one another. That would not be good for our film because the news people have nothing to do with each other, they are just telling the same story.
     Next, I started to research about green screens. I was trying to figure out how we could edit our scene without using one since none of us have one. In this process, i learned that the term green screen also refers to a computer terminal. It actually has a lot to do with coding! So this was perfect. Anyways, back to editing. Can you edit without a green screen? This answer is, to my surprise, yes! I found a video on youtube that showed me exactly how to do it. So you outline what you want to keep in the picture. Basically your cutting out all of the irrelevant parts of the video. Which in our case would be the grey wall we used. You then press the smooth button that makes your picture less pixelated around the parts you cut out. You then can add your own background. Not needing to use green screen is going to make it so much easier to make our video.

http://www.yourdictionary.com/green-screen

http://www.lavideofilmmaker.com/filmmaking/film-editing-tips.html

http://www.mediacollege.com/video/editing/transition/jump-cut.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB_RYT2ZRQM

Recording Day

Recording Day

   Recording day!! So today we filmed the opening credits and my part. We are meeting up again Sunday, March 19, to finish. That may be my fault. I took a really long time not messing up on my lines.  I didn't understand who Edward Snowden was so it was hard to memorize. I decided to go online and research about him and realized that in 2013 he was hired by the NSA. He leaked documents that proved that the NSA was spying on American citizens. Now he is hiding in Russia because the government is not allowed to take him from there. This was a good thing to mention because this was a huge leak of information in America. We said in the news report that this was the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. This tells the audience that this leak was pretty big.
    For the credits, we decided on our first idea. We are going to type it all out in green because it looks much better then the split screen idea. Also, the sound effect of typing makes the audience know from the start that the movie will most likely be based on something to do with the internet. This makes it much easier for them to understand whats going on if they have trouble understanding what the news reporters are talking about.We want our movie opening to be as clear as possible that leaves the audience with a little bit of wonder on who this man is, what he is leaking, and why it is such a big deal.






"Javascript Is Disabled in Your Browser." Courage Snowden Home Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2017.

http://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden-revelations/#r80q_eMiFPq8

https://www.nsa.gov

Script Finished!!!

Script Finished!!!

Today we all met at my house. We had some idea of what we were doing but not much. So we began our thought process. For our credits in the beginning, we still aren't completely sure on what we our doing but we have two great ideas. One we type a bunch of stuff in green coding and in the middle of the screen it is a fast motion video of the screen typing the credits. The other Blake came up with and since his computer wasn't on him today I'm not completely sure how his idea is gonna work. He said he can program it in a way where he can make the screen split and make other windows pop up with our credits. It sounds cool but we are going to make the decision when we begin to film. I believe it will look something like this.


We wanted to make the first scene of three different news reporters from three different stations telling the same story about the hacker. So we are trying to come up with different accents to enforce this. I know that I am the worst at accents so I will be from America. Not really sure where the other two are gonna be from but we will figure it out! All three of us are going to explain about the hacker named "IP". We named the hacker this because IP is an Internet Protocol and we thought that was genius. This whole part is going to look and sound like someone is watching it. Its not going to be just the direct screen. We are going to use Photo Booth, which is on Apple computers.
     Once the reporters say what they need to say its going to exit the page and go back to green coding. So now the audience is in the hackers point of view. Granted, they still don't know the hackers identity, this keeps them interested and provides the element of suspense that is so important in thriller movies. He will type a few things ad then turn his computer off. The audience will see his reflection on the computer screen and then BAMN our title will appear. We still don't know our title but our temporary one is Hacked.
     Of course, we need to tweak a few things, but we are planning on recording Saturday, March 18. We are super excited and hope this film looks as good as it does in the picture in our heads.
 

   "IP." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2017.

Research

Research

  So, beginning to go more in depth for my research. A thrillers main element is suspense. So we really want to have a little suspense regardless of how short the opening will be. We want it to be fast pace and filled with action. The topic we choose in kind of tricky. How do we make the first two minutes of a film about hacking have action and suspense. Our audience needs to feel like they want to watch more. They need to feel thrilled and amazed. So, our hacker isn't going to be some nice guy who works for the government. He is going to be a sinister kinda guy. I began to research about hacking. It's actually extremely interesting yet confusing. You need to learn a whole programming language. These hackers that we have in todays world have got to be extremely bright. You have to use all kinds of *nix terminals which are incredibly confusing. Of course, we aren't going to use complicated coding for our film, but it's still nice to know what kinda stuff we will be working with.
   For our credits we are going to type all of it in green coding. its going to look amazing. We are so excited. After we have all of the credits typed up our title is going to appear in a somewhat digital kind of way. The picture we have in our head looks really cool so lets hope it turns out just as cool.

http://www.wikihow.com/Hack

http://lifehacker.com/266625/nix-command-line-reference-guide

NEW IDEAS AND MEMBER

NEW IDEAS AND MEMBER

Blake, a friend of ours, decided to join our group. You see, his group decided to all go their own ways and he did not want to work alone. We both wanted to work with him to begin with so it worked out in the end. Our new trio was trying to rack our brains for an idea for a movie opening. We all agreed on sticking with the action/thriller rout. We all threw around different ideas till one of us mentioned hacking. We though it was neat and decided to stick with it. We wanted to make it somewhat complex and original so we wanted to somehow incorporate kidnapping somewhere in that. We don't have thought out visuals yet, but it is defiantly a good start.

Genere Selected

Genere Selected

 Hi, my name is Darrah Schaffer! My partner and I were trying to think of the perfect genre for our movie opening.  Both of us are not very creative so we decided to start with the basics. There are so many options: action, adventure, comedy, crime, drama, historical, horror, musicals, science fiction, thrillers,war, and westerns. We tried to think of a variety of movies that we enjoy in hope of some inspiration. We narrowed it down to action or thriller. We decided to just keep it between these two since both are so similar. We began to start researching all about Action and Thriller genres. We decided on this because having a fast face, exciting movie is fun to make and it is easier to think of ways to grab your audience in two minutes. If we leave them with wonder, it will make them want to watch the rest of the movie for sure. If we do that, it proves that we made a great movie opening.

          Action                                                                                                                                    

• Has a villan                                                                                                   
• Many crazy visual spectaculars 
• Fast pace
• Needs a hero
• Many stunts 

        

        Thriller 

• Suspense
• excitement 
• surprise 
• pop-scares
• cliffhangers 
• plot twists 
• anticipation 
• anxiety

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/8/2/5-key-elements-you-need-for-a-kick-ass-action-movie/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_film

http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/horror-film

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_film

http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/adventure%20movie