SEleNe CC
A live grid pilot and the cyberattack against it, both made watchable
I produced four films for a Horizon Europe consortium, combining footage from a Greek solar park with an illustrated cyberattack sequence.
Problem
COCOON is a Horizon Europe project on cooperative cyber protection for modern power grids, run across a consortium. It has two halves that pull in opposite directions. One half is physical: a photovoltaic park in Halkidiki, a control cabin, an operator on a laptop, and the first time the Greek distribution operator supervised and controlled PV parks in real time. The other half has never happened and cannot be filmed, because it is an attack on equipment that is still running. The audience is mixed in the same way: engineers on one side, reviewers, policy people and the public on the other, all needing the same story without the vocabulary.
Idea
I filmed what existed and wrote what did not, then held both to one visual system. The pilot film goes to the site and stays there. Objectives and milestones sit as typed cards over the array, then the film hands over to a vertical phone frame inside a solar cell. The van, drive, gate, contractor’s sign, control cabin, inverter and logging kit appear one by one, ending on the HEDNO researcher in front of the rows he has described.
The explainer does the opposite job. None of it could be shot, so I read the grant text and technical diagrams down into a single chain of events: entry point, lateral move, control layer and physical effect. I agreed one diagram vocabulary before drawing anything. Colour carries state and nothing else, so a partner can point at a frame and identify the stage that is wrong.
What I made
- A pilot film for the Secure Energy Communities demonstrator, shot at the photovoltaic park in Halkidiki with the pilot leader.
- A second pilot film and a project promo.
- A vector attack explainer that walks an intrusion through a grid, one hop at a time. It holds one visual system from the first frame to the last, so a viewer who does not know what a substation is can still follow which box went dark and why.
Result
I delivered four films to SEleNe CC for the COCOON consortium. The pilot film carries the two milestones the project needed on record: real-time supervision and control of PV parks by HEDNO for the first time, and the first execution of Ancillary Services in a real-world environment in Greece. The project is publicly documented under Horizon Europe grant agreement 101120221.
How I built it
This one ran on the writing. On the pilot film, the footage is real and the words had to survive review by the people who ran the trial. Every objective and milestone card therefore uses the consortium’s own language, set on screen a clause at a time, with nothing paraphrased. On the explainer, generation covered environments, establishing shots and the abstracted grid. I sent every technical claim back to the consortium before placing it in a render.
Artefacts
- Films
- Promo, two pilot films, one explainer
- Site cut
- Vertical park tour, captioned, framed in a solar cell
- Storyboard
- One event chain, written then boarded by hand
- Diagram system
- One vocabulary across four pieces, colour as state
Gates
Gate 01
Claim gate
Nothing appears on screen that the grant text does not support. On the pilot film, that extends to the milestones: I call a first a first only when the consortium will sign the sentence.
Gate 02
Vocabulary gate
One diagram system runs across all four pieces. A new shape needs a new meaning, or I do not draw it.
Gate 03
Site gate
I did not re-stage anything at the park for the camera. What the phone sees is what the engineers were doing.
Stack
- Source
- Grant text, consortium diagrams, site footage
- Storyboard
- Written, then boarded by hand
- Frames
- Nano Banana Pro
- Motion and assembly
- Higgsfield, CapCut
Frames & films
