An element of the storyline takes place as an internet chat. The director and I created a set of files that were used as on-screen elements. The “perp’s” computer desktop. (You’ll notice the striking resemblance to a Window’s desktop aesthetic. Bad guys don’t use Macs!) The director and I created these graphics using Photoshop elements and then animated it in AfterEffects. The director’s computer fed a monitor in front of our actors and a functional keyboard was used for the perp. To animate the conversation between the perp and his victim, the first three frames we’re lines of the conversation in the message window. The actor simply pressed the “forward arrow” on the keyboard advancing frame-by-frame and displaying the next line of text in the message window. (For the example above, I expanded each line of text by 10 frames for display purposes.) Then, to animate the pop up window, another actor pressed the space bar to play the movie. These were QuickTime files. When opened with the QuickTime player, we set the application to Full Screen and Loop. In this graphic, we went with a more Unix or proprietary design. The conversation windows are similar but we added a tracing program and locations window. The tracing program is built from transparent windows (I got the idea from the way I set-up my Terminal window in OSX.) A random number generator and multiple text path plug-in layers are then added with offset transparency routines. The FBI seal is a download from the web. ]]>
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