16th December 2013 - Last Day of Production

Coming Soon!

11th December 2013 - Fourth Day of Production

10th December 2013 - Third Day of Production

9th December 2013 - Second Day of Production

Shooting scenes #7 and #8

Our second shoot was a bit shorter than a first one due to us only shooting two scenes. The reason for that was those two scenes were shot at the same location - our school. Now we have 6 scenes shot in total and 6 more to go. The scenes we left our selves to shoot are ones down the St. Margaret's Bay, the A20 and in a house. We left those scenes 'till last as we need to get transport to get us there.

We plan to shoot the scenes down the A20 on the 10th of December, scenes down the St. Margaret's Bay on the 11th of December and at a house on the 16th of December.

4th December 2013 - First Day of Production

Shooting scenes #1, #6, #9 and #11

We did our first shoot. We shot these scenes together as they all take place in the same location in the story. They are all of the interrogation room scenes and since they all had to be shot on the green screen we had to set everything up in the classroom and in all of the scenes Alex had to have the same make up done. It was just easier to do all of them in one shoot.

This is the time lapse of the make up being done:

Short Film Final Idea

The Ghost Network is a short film about a group of hackers who are systematically shutting down the UK computer infrastructure. They do that in a two-step process, starting with crashing the satellites signal to prevent any on ground mobile communication and end it with crippling UK’s economy by crashing the stock market.

Alex, our main protagonist, was an undercover Secret Service agent whose goal was to infiltrate the group of hackers and try to stop them. When all the plans failed, he is now the only person who can stop the group from crashing the stock market. He has been brainwashed by them and he lost all the memories about this group, what they are up to and how to stop them. All he’s remembering is a sequence of numbers which mean nothing to him hence he is being interrogated by an unknown person.

Both Alex and the interrogator’s goal are to stop the group from the attack but will Alex remember anything?

Ending Scene Wall Breach

For the final scene where Alex with two other Secret Service agents find the server room, they need to breach through a brick wall to get into it. I created this short animation to demonstrate how this could look (of course it's not finished or fully rendered) and to get the feel of the shot.

As you can see this is not finished as it needs texturing, other particles, smoke and most of all the server room itself but this video was just to demonstrate how the wall explosion could look like.

Short Film Title Animation Idea

We as a group have not finally yet decided on the title for our film but we have few ideas. The top two are "Behind Closed Doors" and "Beyond the Darkness". In the video below I used the second option but it is not our final title. I only used it to come up with some ideas on how we could show our title in the film opening scene. The idea came to me after seeing a YouTube video which did most likely the same thing. It was a tutorial so the idea wasn't copy righted and it was used to teach people how to create logos/titles like that.

I think this idea will work pretty well as the writing just turns into smoke and disappears (this is not a full animation) and it represents our protagonist in a way. He doesn't remember anything he lost his memory, he is in the darkness basically and it's like his memory vanished just like the title animation above.

Final Poster Render

This is the end result of the interrogation room render with new additions and few little but big changes.

The major change from the previous renders is that the above image had five displays in it showing some numbers which refer to the main story plot and are the key to the mystery. I have also decided to change how the light bulb looks. In previous images the light was emitting from the whole glass piece but when I looked back at the older renders it didn't look very realistic. Instead what I decided to do is apply the actual glass shaded to the glass and create and object inside of that which is emitting light. You can see that in the above render the light bulb looks much more realistic than in the two previous ones.

The full sized image of the poster is 3000 pixels wide and 4000 pixels high. This ensures very high quality of the render and because of the very high resolution the poster can be specially printed and put on a wall like a real poster would be.

I also tweaked some of the colour of the image in Photoshop to make it more moody. I removed some reds so the room feels colder and creepier. I added some glow effect to the inside of the light bulb so it looks like it's emitting light and I added a subtle vignette to the image as it looks better with it. The very final result can be seen below.

Improved Poster Render

Like I said in my previous post, I wanted to improve few things in the poster and now I did add/improve these things. Well most of the ones I was talking about anyway.

The door and the door frame both have textures now and the light bulb has a glowing effect added to it which makes it look like its emitting light.

Further improvements of this scene would be adding the TV's to it with numbers on the displays and of course right at the very end our main character being strapped to a chair.

Early Poster Render

Today I started thinking about the poster for our short film. At this point in time I haven't looked at many reference posters but I have looked at some and I tried to get an idea of what they actually have in them. The matter of fact is that they don't have a lot shown in them. Mainly they are showing the main character with some action and/or location that is related to the plot. So I started thinking and thought I would start doing something. So I decided to build a interrogation room in Blender. The idea behind it is that we will have a picture of our main character taken sitting strapped to a chair on a green screen so I can then delete the background and put our character and the chair in the scene that I build and rendered in Blender.

This is a very early render in the development but it has the basic layout of the interrogation room and a concept of how the poster will look like. There will be more added to this scene such as TV screens with numbers on them (relating to the hackers sequence), the door and the frame of the door will be textured alongside the door handle, the light bulb will have a glow effect so it looks more realistic and of course there will be our main character added into the finished picture.

After everything will be in place and the character will be put in, The title of the film and the actors names will be added as text at the top and bottom of the poster.

Early CGI Tests - Ground and Asphalt

While creating the Concrete Wall Fracture, I also came up with the idea of destroying ground with asphalt on top, which could be used in the exterior scenes. As you can see in the video, in the OpenGL render there are two layers of the ground/asphalt with two different colours. The thin top layer is the actual asphalt. It's fractured into many smaller pieces which are constrained together which means that when the asphalt gets hit by something not all the pieces will fly off in the air individually but will be kept mostly kept together. The second layer, which is the majority, is the ground which is also fractured into many smaller pieces but they are not constrained which means they will all fly off individually and will not be stuck together. (Watch in 1080p for better quality and detail).

Early CGI Tests - Concrete Wall

Using Blender I have created this concrete wall and fractured it so it looks like something explodes through it and the idea behind this is that, when our main character is being interrogated and sitting alone in this room, people will try and get him out of there and will blast through the wall to get to him. The first part of the video is a OpenGL render while the second part is all wire-frame. All the pieces of the wall have a correct weight applied to them taking into account their sizes and the material which they are made of which in this case is concrete. (Watch in 1080p for better quality and detail).

Interrogation Room Ideas and Research

In the plot of our story, our main character is being interrogated after being brainwashed to understand a mysterious sequence of numbers created by the hackers group. I have looked at some images of different interrogation rooms that different pieces of each one could be used and could fit our story and setting.

This is the first image:

In this image we can see two people looking at a person being beaten up and interrogated and the persons face has blood on it. In our film we want to do something similar. We want our ex hacker being interrogated by two people behind the glass but you cant see their faces and the interrogated person in sitting in a room alone strapped to a chair but his face also looks beaten up and he looks exhausted for a reason.


This is the second image:

In this image we can see almost the entire interrogation room. The chair in the middle is exactly the kind of thing we want. We want our main character to be strapped in a single chair in the middle of a room but instead of him being surrounded by nothing (or few tables like in this image) we want to have him surrounded by many monitors all showing different numbers referring to the hackers number sequence.


This is the third and fourth image:

Here we can see the same interrogation room but from two different angles (second image below). In the top one we can have a look at the chair in the corner that the interrogated person would sit on and around many TVs. That is what we are kind of aiming at but not exactly. We want to make it more modern because in both of these images the TVs are from the 60's. In our short film we want to have flat screens and many more of them than what you can see in both of these images. We will achieve this by creating the entire set inside of a computer in a software called Blender and shooting the interrogated man on a green screen and tracking him in a 3D space also in the same software but more on that in a future post.

Initial Idea and Genre of our Short Film

For A2 we are going to create a short film. At the very beginning on the first day we had two ideas that we were thinking about. One of them was a more of a documentary about animals and the second one was a thriller about hackers which in the end we went with because it seemed like a much better idea and it's not a documentary.

In few sentences, it's a story about a member of a hackers group who has been brainwashed. Now he's being interrogated by two people of whom we don't see the face until the last few minutes of our short film. Our ex member of a hackers group has been brainwashed with a sequence of numbers which have a great impact on the storyline (which I will not reveal right now).