In 2008, Steve Stone – a digital artist and first-time director, began working on an idea initially titled “Beast”. Steve works in the same building at Riccall Business Park as ourselves and over the next three years, the team at The Cybermill watched as the script developed from a small “indie” movie into something much bigger. Famous actors started arriving at the business park, cameras, sound, lighting – and our Managing Director Iain was lucky enough to get a part in the production as an ‘extra’.
Bespoke graphic design
Before filming began Steve asked us to produce some Visual FX for the film. We can’t go into too much detail, but the synopsis of the film actually allows us to say something:
“The Darkest Secrets TV programme revisits the sites of unsolved crimes. They employ the gifts of a psychic whose extraordinary powers may shed new light on this old mystery.”
Our remit was to produce the visuals for the ‘Darkest Secrets’ laptop display – software showing a choice of camera feeds and a variety of toggles and settings. The laptop screen would be featured in the film and needed to be controlled by the actors – and by remote keyboard. We added features so different screens can be zoomed to show video feeds from a selection of cameras.
Custom website design
We were really pleased when Steve then asked us to design and build the website for the film. Most film websites are normally produced by specialist agencies so we were delighted that Steve chose us for the site.
Steve gave us a basic idea of what the site had to convey and we created design drafts based on his requests. Some of the concepts we began with were; ‘First person camera footage’, ‘dark areas of your mind’, ‘remote Russian forests and military installations’.
We looked at many different websites produced by various mainstream studios for a similar genre and came to a conclusion using language which we can’t repeat here! Large studio sites often use ‘Flash’, a platform allowing for animation and screen resizing. Unfortunately this makes the sites slow to load and generally have poor, over-complicated user interface design. It also means that the sites don’t work on Apple mobile devices (iPhones and iPads) – because the format is not supported.
We took the decision in-house not to use Flash: we decided that we could produce the same effects using scripting and the latest browser technologies. This would make for a cleaner, lighter site with all the same functionality (that also works on Apple devices).
The background images are designed to resize to the browser window while still keeping their aspect ratio (i.e. so they don’t look squashed). They also fade in gradually under the background static to give an impression of depth and feeling to the site. If you view the site in in Chrome, all the capitalised fonts have a grungey texture on them.
The site also works on mobile devices with the text and graphics re-aligning into a single column for small screen sizes to make for easier reading.
We’re really pleased with the site, and the reaction to it from the cast and crew has been excellent.
Steve and his entire team have worked incredibly hard to make an excellent film.
