Short Form Video Project – CCTV Research

CCTV has become such a commonly used abbreviation that many people actually forget what it stands for, which is ‘Closed-circuit Television’. It is most commonly used for surveillance, but can also be used as a handy tool for distance education, where the learner doesn’t have to be on site. They were first made to increase the security in banks, and are now commonly used in various places, such as schools, airports, corner shops and many more. They can also be used in industrial plants to monitor parts of the plant that are not suitable for humans to enter.

CCTV has been a very helpful tool in crime prevention or for capturing culprits, as committing a crime in front of a CCTV camera is pretty much the same as being caught red handed. It can also be used to monitor traffic, which is very useful as it can result in notifying road users if there have been accidents in certain places and therefore helping reduce congestion.

It seems that CCTV cameras are so commonly used everywhere now that everyone just expects there to be a camera watching somewhere so sometimes they can be lulled into a false sense of safety. For example, my friend was playing a computer game in an internet area in HMV and one would expect them to have cameras covering each area of the shop as they’re a large high street chain shop. Thus, his mind was focused on the game as he felt nothing would happen if he left his valuables by his side as even if someone took it it would be caught on camera. Unfortunately, after he had finished the game, he realized that all his stuff was gone and so went immediately to speak to a shop assistant to hopefully find the culprit and reclaim his belongings. However, after speaking with the shop assistant, he discovered that that particular area of the shop was not actually under surveillance and therefore he could not get his stuff back. He then spoke to a few other people in the area and discovered that there had actually been repeated thefts in that particular place.

So CCTV cameras can be very useful for stopping crime, but unfortunately it seems that good criminals will know where all the cameras are and therefore still manage to get away with it!

It does however manage to catch the bad/stupid criminals as I happen to know someone who stole someones bag in a place where there was clearly CCTV, which then resulted in the person receiving his bag back and the criminal being prosecuted.

I think that CCTV cameras used in public is fine and quite helpful most of the time, but if it were to develop into being used in peoples home then that would be quite outrageous and definitely intruding on ones privacy.

Short Form Video Project – Website

http://hostagefilm.eu/home.html

My website design turned into a website by Luke!

As you can see, he made a few changes to my initial design. At first we had some disagreements because I felt the suggestions he was making were unnecessary and also felt a bit like he was criticizing my design. But eventually we managed to come to a compromise. He wanted to move Day 2 and Day 3 to places that were just as visible as Day 1, but as I put them in places that were less visible deliberately, I did not want to move them. In the end, he still moved them but he moved them to a spot that looked much more effective than where he had initially suggested to move them, so I decided it was okay.

He also left out the statistics link, but I guess this was because he felt it was unnecessary or we didn’t manage to accumulate as many statistics as we had hoped.

I like how the words ‘Day 1′ are presented in this and felt that it was actually an improvement on my initial design. However, I’m not so sure about where he placed the bullets and numbers. I think they could have been positioned a bit better and they are possibly a bit too far to the left; though I did feel it was a cool idea for the video to be shown on the right as you clicked on the numbers on the left, as this meant being able to switch between the different clips much more easily.

I think the same pros and cons applies to the ‘Day 2′ page.

He didn’t change the biographies page much, so I guess the initial design worked quite well for it.

Even though their were changes, the website did turn out quite like what I had originally envisioned so I’m reasonably happy with it.

Short Form Video Project – Rest of the Pages

This is the page for Day 3. Originally, I didn’t think a page for Day 3 was necessary because I wasn’t sure that there would actually be enough footage to fill up a ‘Day 3′ as well. However, I made a Day 3 page just in case. It was done in a similar way to Day 1 and 2 because I wanted to have continuity in the pages for the ‘Days’. However, I didn’t want it to look too similar to any of the other pages, as, so far, most of the pages have something different in them, but they follow the overall theme. Thus, I decided to use pistols in this instead of bullet holes or blood splats. It would however, be animated in the same way as the other two.

In the end, I was right about there not being enough footage for Day 3 to be necessary because Luke did not end up linking Day 3 with this page.

This is the Biographies page. I decided to use text only on this page because I felt it was appropriate as biographies mainly consist of text. I also made the words ‘terrorists’ white instead of black like the others to make it stand out as they were the main antagonists of the narrative. I initially wanted the links on this page to link to a page with a bit of writing and some photos of each of the main people from each group. However, no one had any good photos of everyone and there were some good photos of some of the people but I thought it would be better to put no photos at all than to put some photos in some of the links, as this would create inconsistency.

So then I handed all these pages to Luke to begin animating and encoding. I tried watching him whilst he did some of it to try and help out, though I’ve never used Flash before so I had no clue about what he was doing, so I could only discuss with him the design aspects of the site.

Short Form Video Project – Website Ideas

I will be doing the aesthetics of the website for the ‘Hostage’ video. I spoke to Phil to get a rough idea about the structure and look of the website. He said he wanted it to look quite dramatic with the use of black and white and blood red in certain areas, so this is what I came up with:

I think we should definitely animate areas of the site using Flash.

Opening Title/Image

My initial idea for this part was to have the words and paint splat flicker between white and black to give it a sort of old film reel-like feel to it, as that’s the kind of style I felt Phil wanted me to present.

The above will then fade out and into the first/homepage:

‘Day 1′ will link to all the scenes that happen in the first ‘day’. I started with the idea of just having ‘Day 1′ on the main page, but then decided it would be useful to add ‘Day 2′ and ‘Day 3′, in case people return to the site hoping to view the other ‘days’ as they have already seen the first. Biographies will link to the bios of each of the main characters, such as lecturer, students etc.

This shows the updated version of the homepage. I added statistics as well, because we were asked to do research on various subjects such as CCTV cameras as part of this project, so I thought it would be useful to have a statistic link to link to this research. I decided to place ‘Day 2′ and ‘Day 3′ in locations that made them less visible that ‘Day 1′. This is because I wanted to subtly emphasize to the users that ‘Day 1′ should be viewed first, as that was how Phil wanted it.

This next image will be the ‘Day 1′ page. I felt it looked effective to use bullet holes as the links to each of the six different clips from each group. I specifically designed it like this so that when it was animated in flash, each number could appear in timing with gun shots and therefore look like the bullet holes were being made.

The numbers will link to the six different videos (the student part, lecturer part etc).

The ‘Day 2′ page. This would be animated in a similar way to the page above, except with blood splat noises instead gun shots.

I chose to use blood and guns a lot in this design because I felt it was appropriate as guns and violence appeared as a theme in the storyline.