Point Of View

It's interesting that I now feel we started looking at social media and online crime from the wrong perspective at the start of production. I think without realizing it we've pushed with the notion that online crime is really very bad and a very serious problem, something that could be a serious threat to national security and our private lives.

When interviewing Cliffe, of the Leeds Met Computer Forensics department, he sort of took offence to a question I asked. I was saying how the papers were constantly reporting events involving hacking etc. His response was that the media will report something because it's 'not' happening all the time, if it was then the media would look past it. He went on to warn us not to sensationalize the documentary and look to scare people with the film because in his opinion, though hacking is happening a lot, it's not about to bring down the planet and start the end of the world.  

He also made it very clear that the vision of online crime/hacking portrayed in the movies is a very stylized and embellished version of the truth. So, right now, what I'm thinking is that we, as filmmakers, have perhaps jumped at this topic because of what we see and hear in the media, but if you just scratch at the surface it's not really that big of an issue. I think social media as a subject has a lot to offer but online crime is perhaps a weak topic, looking back it's a shame we went down this route.