When writing the script for the voice overs we wanted to introduce the topic. Explaining the origins of video games and how they came to be a household item as well as using statistics to explain just how many people play these games, especially young people. We planned to have this introduction voice over play with a video game song play underneath.
Here are a couple of pictures about video game statistics that we used to inform our voiceovers.
This opening voiceover will be playing underneath the footage we found earlier of a video game factory.
The rest of the voice overs will be used to introduce the different topics of the interviews and the outro will song will be Videogames by Lana Del Ray.
First we contaxcted the Sussex Video Gaming Society through their facebook group to se if anyone would be interested in being interviewed.
We then went along to one of their meeting and interviewed around five people. Here is a picture of us interviewing two of the members of the Sussex University Video Gaming Society.
We encountered a few problems with the footage we took, firstly we had far too much (around an hour) that obviously means that we need to cut a lot to fit into a 4 minute documentary. We will do this by first transcribing all of the interviews and then performing a paper edit to make the editing on the computers quicker and easier.. The second problem that the sound only recorded through one channel, but this is easily fixed in the edit by duplicating one audio channel onto the other.
While making our documentary luckily there was an interesting documentary aired on channel 4 called Videogames changed the world, made by Charlie Brooker. This documentary about videogames gave us lot's of ideas for our documentary.
As you can see there were interviews in the documentary with the interviewees framed well in the shot.
There were also cutaway shots of people playing the games systems. We used a similar type shot.
Then there were often cutaways to the gameplay of the games being talked about. Something we also tried to do.
There was even a section at the end where they discussed how the videogame Minecraft is now used to teach children in school. This seemed pretty relevant to our topic.
Music is going to very important in our documentary to set the tone and also to give the viewer insight into what these games actually sound like.
Jet Set Radio Future is an xbox game that was mentioned by one of our interviewees
The music of this game is interesting and can potentially be used in our documentary.
Jet set radio future concept of love
Sims 3 is also mentioned by one of our interviewees
8 bit music. This is a popular format of music for hardcore video game players who grew up playing Nes and Snes. The songs have a very basic but distinctive sound as they were originally created on pretty limited machines so there was not enough memory for full songs. This style is still very popular today. We could maybe use some in our documentary.
Here is a video game song that I found that I enjoy. It has lots of references to many games in it. I'm not sure it's suitable for our documentary but I like it.
We found some footage on Youtube of a video game manufacturer in the 80's we downloaded it and plan to use it in our intro.
We also plan to use this video taken from a Playstation 4 press conference where they talk about how games today are no longer limited by technology, only our imagination.
Here are some games that our interviewees spoke about in their interviews. We will probably use some of this footage for cut aways.
To inform our documentary we looked a research article related to gaming and the psychological effects it has on gamers. There were a wide range of viewpoints, ranging from saying video games cause violence in children to saying children playing video games is actually a positive thing as it improves hand eye coordination and reflexes.
The questions we asked our interviewees were informed by these articles. Their answers seemed to agree with the more positive arguments from the articles with them talking about how they like to get lost in the world and feeling a sense of achievement from doing certain actions in the games, although some agreed that they may have played for too long when they were younger.
Here are some examples of the articles we looked at and took inspiration from.
This blog will be my portfolio for the video elective where I am tasked with making a four minute documentary in a group.
