Week Commencing 10/05/10

10/05/10

As i had no reply from codemasters, i decided to ring up i got through and they said they would ring back. Me and Ian went into town i started to get vox pops on people who did not fit the sterotype of gamer. I captured these.

11/05/10

We went into town again to get some more vox pops with beth this time we thought people could talk to her better. I filmed them, and i put and sort of style to the vox pops by having a CU of the face, and having the face far on either the left or right, with the other side showing the background. I captured these.

12/05/10

a group consisting of everyone apart from beth went to my house to start filming presenter scenes and game footage, I set the mise-en-scene up by find geeky poster's and using lamps to create a homely dim feel to the light. I also set the console and games up to record through my dvd recorder. Finally I was the alternate cameraman.

13/05/10

I started capturing the previous days footage and I started to have a look into effects so that i could make i cartoon effect, i found an effect called line art which i decided to use on alternate shots. I also found an effect called bad tv which I would use for transitions. The game footage would not capture.

14/05/10

I tried calling codemasters but still no luck we decided to discuss what we would do if we could not get an interview.

Week Commencing 03/05/10

04/05/10

This was our re-pitch, the power point looked better and all irrelevant parts of the pitch were taking out, I changed mine slightly as I was basically saying what I said before so I changed it so it was quicker and more to the point. We seem to be pitching something similar to the gadget show where as we were more aiming for a more Charlie Brooker style show.

05/05/10

I brought in my xbox 360 and came in early to have a look at how could capture the game footage, we had already thought of the idea of burning straight to dvd via a dvd recorder. We could do this but i wasn't happy with the quality that would bring. So i asked Graham if there were any cadets around media tech, we tried different things including plugging straight into the tape deck, this only lets us record sound. By the end of the day we realised that the dvd recorder was the only option

06/05/10

I created a document that listed all the pre-production that we needed for the assignment, i ask who wanted to do what, i gave myself the job of looking into risk assessments, creating the storyboard, consent forms and contact list. I started work on the contact list with a beth and then did the consent forms.

07/05/10

Today we continued with the contact list, as more were added, i also started the storyboard.

Week Commencing 26/04/10

26/04/10

This was the day before our pitch, we got together and through the pitch and everyone's research so we all knew everything about the pitch and could hopefully answer any question. We disscussed style, narrative and the audience research. We then rehearsed so we knew who was doing what and when so we were confident when pitching. I wrote down a few notes that I would have me in the pitch, these detailed some of the more complicated parts of the ofcom rules.

27/04/10

Today we pitched, I think our personal presentation was good but unfortunately we did not take into account what our power point would look like in a brightly lit room, so i think people were distracted from us talking because of how bad the power point was. I also think that some parts of the pitch went on for to long, but i felt i presented well.

28/04/10

As we need to re-pitch, we went through the presentation and looked at things that did not work the first time and enhance things that did. I changed mine slightly because the people who we were emailing had changed. I emailed microsoft.

29/04/10

we changed one of the contacts from konami to playstation, so i emailed playstation and also codemasters.

30/04/10

no one had replied to any of my emails, so we started thinking of how we could implement a contingency plan, we looked at something to do with violence in games.

Week Commencing 19/04/10

19/04/10

Today we looked at what had to be included in the pitch, we discussed the different ideas that were floating around the group and we narrowed them all down to what we wanted. We discussed whether the idea had a clear question and what the question should be. We planned ahead and produced a schedule for the next few weeks so we were organised and had targets to aim for.

20/04/10

We looked further into the idea breaking every point down into to manageable parts, we soon found that our idea was too broad and would never fit into a 10 minute programme. So we looked at using one of the parts we broke the original idea into, we chose Playstaion 3 vs Xbox 360: which is better? We chose this idea because we felt it was more relevant as that is the current console war, and has been for a few years. We also thought this would be good as we have a personal interest, which means we have more general knowledge on it than a topic we did not have an interest in.

21/04/10

We looked into the narrative of the programme, how we would structure it, as we are comparing to different products we have to make the narrative look unbiased. We decided that we need everyday peoples opinions, and we need to show them in equal amounts or so opinions cancel each other out.

23/04/10

As a group we decided to work on our separate parts for the pitch. I started to look into how to gain copyright permission. I found on the microsoft website if we add in

'[The title of your Item] was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from GAMENAME, © Microsoft Corporation.'

We could use pictures of the xbox 360 and game footage from Halo 3, if it was for private or non-commercial use. I also found email address for Konami and Codemasters. I also looked into ofcom rules effecting the documentary.

Week Commencing 12/4/10

13th april 2010

We looked into the codes and conventions of documentary, and learnt that the idea of a documentary is interviews with cutaways to illustrate what has been said in the interviews. We realised that all documentaries are there to answer a question and be informative, so when making ours we had to make sure it was well balanced and was being creative, entertaining and informative.

14th april 2010

I started to try and think of what consoles should be featured and why? what games should be implemented and how they should be.

15th april 2010

Beth Sharp joined our group much to my dismay, but as in the media industry you cannot choose who you work with i did not make a fuss. We started to realise that our project was incredibly and we wouldn't be able to cover all of it in our time frame, we had to decided how we were going to revise it into a more manageable project. We did this by choosing specific popular consoles rather than every console within the 30 years.

New project 16th April 2010

Lecturers did not like the music idea, so we mutually changed the idea to something that interest the whole group as much as music would. We chose to look at how games and the gaming industry has grown over the last 30 years by comparing consoles and the audiences. We also wanted to look into what is the 'stereotype' gamer and how we could break it.

'Decline of the music industry' 12th April 2010

Today we returned to college after easter. The group got together to talk about what we are going to do, and how we are going to do it. We decided to make the documentry an opinionated documentry, loosely like Fahrenheit 9/11. We came up with many ideas of who to interview such as unsigned bands, just signed bands, bands that have made it and the playlist people at radio 1. Also I thought Alex Baker from Kerrang! Unsigned may be a good idea. We went from looking at whole genres of music like we wanted to more specific bands, such as: Gehtika, Fix Monday and Basment Jaxx. I also emailed Sophy Blout about doing some interviews at the HND reverb gig in 2 weeks time.

'Decline of the music industry' 26th March 2010

Today we got the assignment. Myself and Mat Neve had already decided to make a documentary for now called 'Decline of the Music Industry'. First thing I did was make this facebook group so the people in the group and lecturers communicate easily. I also thought it would be a great place to do the logbook.