Plot summary

We believe that our documentary would have a greater effect on our target audience if there was a narrative story playing parallel to the interviews. The narrative story would aim to support what is being said on the interviews. This would also help engage the audience as nobody wants to watch a person talk for five minutes. Having a story would also help the audience to relate to our main character.

Our story so far follows Duncan who is a socially awkward gamer. The interviewees are indirectly addressing his problems and discussing whether they believe gaming has or has not caused them. It beings with Duncan performing a daily activity of playing 'Doom' a popular and extremely violent video game which is very controversial. This is then followed by somebody speaking of violence in video games, as Duncan seems to show no evidence of violent behaviour despite playing one of the most violent games to date. We also have Duncan speak about how video games were the cause of his bullying when he was younger, and we show a scene of him being shoved in a hallway. Once again, this aims to help the audience visualise what the interviewee is saying.  

We will also include the interviewees talking of the effects on school work, and how gaming can be extremely distracting. which demonstrates a more negative side to gaming in order to create a balance between negative and positive aspects which will allow the audience to come to their own conclusion, but help them decide. The creation of our narrative will also help our story flow smoothly as we will include an interviewee saying something, then another interviewee either contradicting or agreeing with what the previous interviewee has said. This makes the separate scenes seem more connected and more easily followed by the audience.

Towards the end we began to focus more and more on Duncan as he is our main character and we wanted to emphasise that. Bringing the focus on to him helps to bring all the separate points that the interviewees made together into a character, as if they were all speaking about the same person when in reality they were discussing gaming in general. Duncan's final scene helps to fully present his feelings on the topic as he does not get to speak too frequently earlier in the documentary.

Early visual editing process

Due to the strict deadline, we had to quickly jump into the early editing phase of our project right after filming was complete. Unfortunately, this has set us back quite a lot due to the fact that we discovered that some shots were not up to standard. Whether they were too shaky, or the angle or lighting was off; either way, we had to schedule a reshoot which required a lot of planning and time.

We are editing our media text using iMovie as it is simple and easy to learn for continuity editing. Currently, we have completed the narrative of our text and most of the continuity editing process to allow our documentary to flow smoothly. Furthermore, we have used placeholder shots instead of statistics and news reports that we have yet to acquire. These will hopefully come into place within the final version of the documentary. The group decision to use statistics rather than having a interviewee read them out was made as having a silent black screen with statistics on it provides more of a dramatic effect. The silence also provides the audience with some thinking time and allows them to focus which in turn engages them further with the media text. 

As our documentary is still in its early stages of development, we have not added a backing track to the interviews as we have to find or create one. This is because we have to find one that fits the text in a way in which it does not distract from the narrative, yet is still noticeable. The backing track must also fit the serious atmosphere created by the documentary. 

Casting

We were initially

Kareem was initially considered for the role mainly due to the fact that he is an avid gamer. We were also initially going to focus on the how video games are used as an escape combat certain things. Due to Kareem's epilepsy, he would be perfect for this as he does play video games to fight his epilepsy 

Sofian was considered mainly because of the fact that when we were creating our character, Sofian fit the physical appearance that we had in mind for our character. Unfortunately he was not too interested in video games and therefore was not interested in joining.  

Sayyed was very interested in the subject, and as a past media-student understood the project process.  As he was previously in our group, he was eager to help us. Furthermore, due to his past involvement in acting, he would find it easy to act the narrative based scenes of the documentary. This would've also added a sense of professionalism to our media piece.

Costume planning

We wanted to create a perfect costume to match the current characterisation of our character. Who is socially awkward and an outcast. Though we also had to consider other factors, such as age and gender. We did not want to exaggerate his personality through the costume but instead we wanted to simply imply it. 

One idea we had was to film using our school's uniform as a costume, which would make sense since we are filming in a school setting. Though we decided not to follow through with this idea in fear that using our school's uniform may make the short film look more amateur and very low budget

*Typical teenage clothing

Another idea we had was to make the character wear video game related clothing which will relate to our topic. But we recently decided that we may dismiss this idea as it looks too forced and unnatural. So in the end we simply decided to stick to a regular teenager's clothing as they are easier to acquire and seem normal. 

Cast & Crew

  Youssef Zine

Director of Cinematography & Cameraman & writer

 Adrian Harder Gerbrand

Director & writer

Faaiza Feroz

Designer & Writer

Duncan Dibb-Holland
Actor

Test shots video

A couple of days ago, we decided to take several test shots in order to better prepare for our actual filming days, we edited them together and we will use them to improve our actual shots.