Well, it simply does not get more exciting than this. Our website has not yet been up for a month and Standing There Productions has been hacked by robots. Yes, robots.

Yesterday afternoon, human time, our film site (www.icouldbeanybody.com.au) was suddenly not quite as informative it once had been, at least not about our film. I was extremely busy at the time, having a drink in a bar full of rowdy construction workers, so I couldn’t make out what Stewart was saying when he called. Stewart (who is fast earning his credit as post production supervisor) is sick with a head cold at the moment, so it was like talking on the phone to Barry Manilow from the back of a Guns N Roses concert. Eventually, with my hand over my ear, I deciphered “website” and “hacked”, which was somewhat alarming, except for the fact that these two words were closely followed by the word “Nick”. U.S. Republicans say that Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet, but I suspect they are overlooking the possibility that he could have had quite a bit of help from Nick Jaffe, who helped us set up our website, became virtually our entire camera department on I Could Be Anybody, and who I’ve now discovered also apparently battles robots. Of course he does.

I asked Nick who it was who hacked our site and why they targeted Standing There Productions – had we become an international symbol of all that is wrong with contemporary do-it-yourself filmmaking? Was this a political protest? A cry for help? Were we being targeted because of the subversive secret messages in Rita’s biog?

No, apparently. We were targeted because our password was so crap that a robot could decipher it.

That, and the hacking wasn’t even interesting. I'll post the actual hack image above this when I finally work out how to do it. It's very dull. Nevertheless, this act of vandalism will not go undramatised. We will be holding high level meetings in the New Year to develop new security measures (ie a password that isn’t the actual word PASSWORD) and our spirit shall not be weakened. It is true that our art has been defaced and our spirits dampened, but we are determined to get on with our lives despite the activities of our robot oppressors.

We humans must be strong. Fight on, good friends.

Thanks everyone for the overwhelming responses we've had to our website. To answer the one question we're getting from everyone (who designed it?) the answer is yes, his name is Clark Kent and no, none of us can work out why he always arrives late for meetings, muttering about bad traffic and tucking his shirt in.

Paul Daniel is our website designer. You can call him Superpaul. He is a professional website designer and if you'd like him to do your site, go to www.pauldaniel.com.au and contact him there. He is currently at large in Eastern Europe but he's back soon and we will be holding a parade in the street to hail his return. It is obviously a bonus to have a clever and creative website designer who also leaps tall buildings in a single bound.

Superpaul is also - now stay with me here - somewhat of a font nerd. Take him to a sign, a website, a letter, a subtitle to a movie, even a portion of someone's handwriting, and ask him what font it is. Time him. If his head doesn't explode from trying to decide between two seemingly identical (but apparently vastly different) styles, he'll have your font downloaded, printed out, and walking around the room within thirty seconds.

This was all an enormous surprise to me, because for me FONT always meant Times New Roman. Little did I know there's a whole world out there in which words like 'dingbat' have an entirely serious meaning. Good to know.

I think probably the most alarming moment for me was the day the film turned green. All the black in it went green. I was showing it to Fez The Sound Magician when the opening shot FADED UP FROM GREEN. To be fair, it remained consistent and faded to green at the end as well, but it wasn't the consistency that was bothering me. Fez maybe thought he was doing the music for a sci fi film, but I was sitting there in the sort of blind panic where your brain tries to make up for its overwhelming inability to deal with the current situation by applying the logic it uses for situations it understands better. Mine was going, "It's okay - this way you can make another film. A better film. At least this way you've had the experience of shooting one without having to show it to anyone. This is really a blessing in disguise."

There have been some frustrating moments along the way to making this film happen, but it's a tragic situation when you're typing "what happens when your film turns green" into google. (Apparently it's never happened before, by the way. I got nothing).

I can't remember what happened, maybe the Magician did something, maybe the editing program just changed its mind, but for some reason or another, the green disappeared.

I was typing in some changes to the postproduction script the other day and I did contemplate for a moment (purely for my own amusement) writing at the very bottom of the final page of the script, "Fade to Green". But it's not funny yet. One day maybe, but not yet.

- Lorin.