A Breif Look: Digital Set Pieces - Pestilence
This production will employ some working props for use in the Pestilence film. Currently, they include:
- a Point of Sale (POS) iPad for the tech store
- Zephyra's outgoing phone running the tech store's app
- Zephyra's new phone, which was maliciously jailbroken
- a Projection screen displaying a film in the theatre
- some demonstration devices inside of the tech store
- Digital Phantom's laptop
- a mic connected to the laptop
Scene 1
Scene 1 includes the Point of Sale iPad and demo devices for the tech store. Zephyra walks into the store with her phone and opens the store app to initiate the pickup process. The cashier can interact with the iPad to "take the pickup order" and give her the phone.
However, the applications are actually illusory. The applications are designed from scratch in Figma, a UI/UX design and prototyping platform. I collaborated with Nickolas, a long-distance friend from NYC, with experience in UI and UX design, to create the design for the POS and customer store applications. In a real-world scenario, Figma allows you to design the graphical user interface for software and prototype it on a device. Once the design is finalized, the design is then forwarded to front-end development to be included in an application package.
However, I won't be scripting an actual application to then sideload on a few devices. I determined that the most efficient way to be able to have the working props function was to make a design for an application on Figma, create a flow, and prototype it on the set devices.
For Zephyra's outgoing phone, I had a fake store app that would display a pickup QR code to "scan" so that Zephyra could receive her order efficiently.
As for the demonstration devices and Zephyra's new phone, some of the store demo devices will be interacted with by some background actors, and one will have its own close-up shot as Digital Phantom somehow gains access to it. I'm thinking about using a device that has a clearly visible camera activation indicator to demonstrate this illusory feat. As for Zephyra's new phone, she will be unboxing it, and then booting it up only to find that Digital Phantom has access to it and is practically about to hijack it.
Scene 2
Scene 2 includes the laptop and microphone that Digital Phantom will use. There were some attempts made to connect a microphone to the laptop to record. A Sennheiser EW G4 wireless microphone was used as a working set prop, and we used the microphone unmute indicator to show an illusory status of the microphone being active. No audio was captured through it, however. Since I was not able to get a reliable enough audio signal at the time, I ended up recording with my laptop's internal microphones. At some point, I eventually compared the audio recording from the iPhone and laptop microphones and preferred the sound captured by the iPhone.
As for the laptop, the laptop ran a Kali Linux virtual machine for Digital Phantom to conduct his "criminal activity". Nmap was already preinstalled, and a port scan of a hosting server (that I have permission to conduct a port scan of) was conducted to give an illusion that Digital Phantom was about to penetrate the mall's somehow insecure network.
Scene 3
Scene 3 includes some working props that the actors do not interact with: the projection screen, lighting, and sound system used in the theatre. The only setup required is to connect a laptop to the HDMI cable from the overhead projector, and the 3.5mm audio cable to the mixer to send audio to the installed speakers. OBS Studio (with several plugins installed) will be used to send all video and audio to the installed A/V equipment. All of the audio and video files will be played directly from OBS.
So that was a brief overview of some of the working props that we have from scene to scene! Scene 1 will use the most working interactive set props, each with its own unique purpose. Overall, all of the working props help bring soul and make realism possible for the film.
