We first identified topics we were interested in through the works introduced in class as well as taking current prevalent issues revolving around the internet as a start for our project such as the 50 million users data leak from Facebook.
As elaborated in Hyperessay1, the works we took into consideration were The Pirate Cinema (Nicolas Maigret), Bold3RRR (Jon Cates) and the idea of interactive collective narrative in the third space by Randall Packer.
Preparation work and set up:
Deciding on a costume for the hacker: black hoodie, devil’s LED headband, sunglasses.
Setting up the desktop scene:
- Placing 2 desktops next to each other to expand the scale and to make it look more sophisticated.
- Place DC motor converter with wires to simulate a believable hacking den.
- Opening multiple codes pages, including interactive ones as well as Clarita’s Facebook page.
- Making sure we have a dark environment to work with by switching off all the lights and pasting a note on the door so that there will be no unnecessary interruption.
Changes made to the original storyline:
- To strengthen the idea of the interactive collective narrative: We posted posters reminders and added a poll beforehand on Clarita’s facebook page and OSS NTU to create awareness about the live stream. We also took the audience’s poll results in consideration. (top 2 amongst the 3)
At the same time, Clarita would be replying to the posts made by the “hacker”, claiming that she is being hacked, and does not have control over her Facebook account functions.
2. To strengthen the idea of unintentional voyeurs: Instead of immediately hacking Ling Ern’s bank account, we first create the scene where the hacker randomly decides to bring Ling Ern online, live on the Facebook Live stream. Her camera was hacked first, leading the audience to see Ling Ern’s face and asking the audience to choose an amount of money to be taken from Ling Ern.
3. To exhibit the severity of the possible consequences from hacking: Originally after the first hack of taking the initial sum of money, the live broadcast would have ended. However, we added in the scene where Ling Ern called the bank staff to clarify matters. The hacker then took the opportunity to intercept the phone call and pretended to be the bank staff who then started asking a series of personal questions “needed” for verification. Feeling flustered, Ling Ern provides all the needed details only to be thoroughly scammed by the hacker and her bank account was emptied, leaving her devastated.
Challenges met during the live broadcast:
- Voice changing app did not work on the live broadcast at all. In fact, it is difficult to find an app to work with live changing voice without lag, echos or playback, leading us to abandon the idea of the app and instead uses a fake voice.
2. To have a split screen effect on Facebook Live, the host will be required to start the live stream and invite the audience to appear on the split screen. Instead, we made use of the 14-day trial version of the Belive app. Belive requires both parties to join at the same time, and the host is in control of multiple screen layouts, whether to show only themselves, only the guest, or multiple styles of screen sharings. The invited guest can also wait for the host at the holding gate when the host decides to only show themselves on screen. However, the app seems to have quite a few bugs and can be unpredictable in terms of performance at times. For instance, stopping and restarting halfway through our live broadcast or live video feed without audio or Live audio feed without video.
3. To allow us to get used to the setup and the app, we did a total of 8 trials before moving on to the real live broadcast.
Compiled video for trial runs!
Although we practised multiple times and finally got things to run smoothly on the 8th trial run (which was literally minutes before the final run), things still manage to go wrong, which led to the stream being split into 2 parts. This was due to the Belive app disconnecting Ling Ern’s connection. Also, Clarita’s laptop was on mute and hence she couldn’t hear Ling Ern’s responses, which disturbed the interaction between the hacker and Ling Ern.
The biggest impact of the disruption was viewers’ participation, as some were already invested in the first part, but had to wait while the technical problems were solved.