DMP Behind the Scenes: Cybersecurity Special Effects
Cybersecurity is an important topic, especially at FSCJ’s IT department. The month of October is officially denoted as cybersecurity awareness month, and as such, we at Digital Media Productions wanted to make a video to highlight why cybersecurity is crucial to our work environment.
When we started this project, we knew it would be important to make a video that was informative of course, but we also wanted to use creative elements to make something entertaining, to capture and retain audience attention. We threw around a lot of ideas in the pre-production phase, and eventually landed on the concept of characterizing phishing scams as physical robbers. We thought we could show an employee clicking on a suspicious link and then an actual person would appear and take all critical personal security items.
This was a straightforward idea that could be humorous if done correctly - but then we came up with a more engaging idea. Something more technically complicated - but a fun challenge. What if the “robber” took the personal information from inside the computer screen? That way, we’d be relating phishing scams to where they actually occur - on a computer!
The main technical feature of the video would be the hand reaching through the screen, so we first had to determine what the best approach would be to make this happen. We could do it practically with some forced camera angles by shooting from the side of the computer and having our actor reach their hand around the other side. Or we could go the complete digital direction and overlay a digital cutout of the arm reaching through the computer. Ultimately, after searching YouTube for camera magic recommendations, we decided to utilize a green screen to create a composite image for the final effect.
This meant that we would need to shoot two different shots during production: one in the office of the employee falling for the phishing scam and one in our studio of the robber reaching through the “screen.” This would require a careful measurement of perspective and consistency between shots. We decided to film the first idea as a backup in case the technical aspect didn’t come off effectively.
After engineering a green screen backdrop for the in-computer scene and acquiring our actors, we set off into production. Most of the real movie magic would come in post-production, but it was important that we got clean, technically proficient shots to work with in the editing software. Below are images that show the (relatively) raw footage of the office and green screen shots and then the final composition that was created from merging these together.
The project turned out to be a fun production to write and shoot and taught us some fun movie magic skills! We did end up shooting the alternate version as well and you can watch both video hooks below: