IDEas
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E-Sport documentary about a really successful E-Sport team: Talk about their making, each players and their downfall with a possible interview of players.
Record a week in the life of lockdown. Give an insight on what life looks like for someone during lockdown. Show the negatives and positives from this.
Frag-Movie on my a successful e-sport team in Counter-Strike
Idea 1: E-sport Documentary
For my first idea, I am thinking of making is an e-sport documentary on a really popular and successful team in Counter-Strike. For this documentary there is a lot of work I will need to put in, to make it successful. My initial ideas for this have changed. The idea for the documentary is simply to talk about the team, its success, each player and the downfall of the team. For this part, I will have a paid actor that will record the voice over for me, main reason for this is to have a better effect as I think having a professional speaking with an amazing voice will get the points across to the audience better. Next under the whole voice over, I will have footage I will screen record either from the games to show of the skills and abilities they had (Mainly the best moments/highlights) as well as other footage from YouTube or another platform that will suit the thing that is being spoken about. My aim was to fly out to Poland and interview at least 1 of the players. This has now changed, and I will aim to interview them over some sort of platform like Discord, Zoom, Teams or anything else that supports video calls. The main themes of the documentary would be success, determination, sadness. The documentary will show all pointes of the team and its history so there will be moments that will be happy and sad for the viewers, for example the team winning the finals of a tournament or the teams announcing they are splitting up. The aim for this documentary is to show the success a Polish team has achieved as Poland in general is a country that doesn’t usually achieve a lot in sports or anything else. Also, this is was the longest lasting team in E-sport history and the changed the whole e-sport scene with their presence. As well as, bringing a kind of nostalgia feeling to other gamers and fans that have watched and supported the team when they were around. E-sport at the moment, is one of if not the fastest growing media and sport franchise about. The viewership grows each day and there is a lot of people joining and becoming fans of the scene each day. I am aiming to publish and heavily promote the documentary on YouTube as it will be the first documentary on the team created.
Idea 2: Week in Lockdown
For my second idea, I was thinking of creating a vlog type video. The idea for this is to record my life for 7 days during lockdown. It is hard to say what it will look like as none of it will be staged and I won’t be doing some ‘cool’ things just to make it more interesting and ‘fake’. I am planning to make it 100% authentic to show the effects of lockdown on a student and their day to day life. The video will be pretty long, most likely about 30-40 minutes long as I will make it all into 1 video. I will aim to make each day about 5-7 minutes long so that it fits in and is equal. I will record from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I am thinking of maybe adding a voice over to the video, meaning the first thing I record will have no audio in most cases and in post-production I will record my voice on top and describe each thing I am doing. I will also aim to interview some people to get their perspective on lockdown and how they are feeling/ coping with lockdown, as well as what they are doing during it. The themes that will appear in this documentary will probably be dedication, happiness, sadness. I will also be speaking about mental health in the video and talking about my own (hard to say what it will be at that point). My main focus with this is to show to others that to this day think this whole thing is ‘fake’ and think that it doesn’t affect anyone's lives. I also want to focus on mental health as that is something that isn’t at a lot during this whole pandemic. When it comes to the effects of lockdown on mental and physical health I will include statistics and research I have found online.I will release this whole video on YouTube and will also promote it really well so that it can reach as many people as possible. This video in some ways would be an educational video for some people, to make them understand they are not alone and there are people they can reach out to as well trying to open the eyes of the selfish people that are making this whole thing last a lot longer than it should.
Idea 3: E-sport Frag Movie
For my third idea, I was thinking along the same lines as my first. In this idea, I will want to make a frag movie including all of the best clips of the team that it will be on to show off their achievements as well as amazing skill that they held. The frag-movie will be extremely hard to make and will require loads of practice and learning from my side to make it look ok. The purpose of this whole idea will be to give an insight into what the team was like and what the players were capable of. The main thing about a frag-movie that makes it successful and popular is the editing and the effects added into the movie. They take a massive amount of practice and I will need to make sure I learn all of the basics as well as all other major skills to make it successful. The whole frag movie will consist of only clips from the team I will be doing on which is Virtus.Pro, a really popular and successful Ex Polish team in CS:GO that played together for 5 years straight from the start of CS:GO all the way until 2019 and achieved extremely high things. All of the clips that I will use will either be ones from the internet or ones I will record from ingame myself (all depends on if the games are still available to be watched ingame). I will also need to make sure that the music that I use in the frag-movie is royalty free but also will fit in the mood and tone of the frag-movie as they are usually extremely fast paced and pretty punchy. The reason I thought of this idea is that for a long time I wanted to create a frag-movie but never had an actual reason to create one and this would perfectly fit in with my theme of memory that I want to do in the project. The way that this will fit in with that theme is that I’ve followed this team from their first ever game together all the way to their last, so making this will be not only for my own pleasure to in some way bring me down memory lane and remind me of how amazing they were but also to remind all of the fans of the community of how amazing they were. Overall frag-movies are extremely popular in the gaming community of course if done correctly which is why I’m going to have to pay a lot of attention to my editing when making this as that will be the biggest factor of success.
Proposal
Rationale
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During my time on this course, I have enjoyed a lot of things as well as learnt loads of new skills. The main things I enjoyed throughout the course was definitely the music video project and title sequence. The main thing I enjoyed about the music video project is, developing new skills and learning new ones too. I don’t have a lot of camera experience so during this project I had the possibility to spend a lot of time with someone that is really confident with the camera and knows how to properly use it. The main thing that I enjoyed about both of the projects was the post-production part where I had the possibilities to learn loads of new editing techniques and effects. Due to the ability of being able to learn new effects and editing techniques I was inspired for my FMP to create a documentary. Out of all my ideas, the reason I picked this one is that I have more confidence in creating a documentary. I also have been thinking of creating this since the beginning of the year as it has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I think the main strength of this idea is the fact I have thought of doing it for so long now that I have already done a lot of research in my spare time. As well as, already having a massive knowledge on the team that I’m doing the documentary on. I think due to my knowledge of all this, it will definitely make the documentary a lot more informing to the viewers. When it comes to weakness, I think it will have to be the lack of any face to face footage during the interview. I think that the main thing that could possibly make it fail, which I will do everything to avoid, is if the editing isn’t good and on point. I will need to make sure that I don’t forget the editing and make it all crisp. The main reason I picked this idea over my other two, is simply because of my interest in the game and the whole community. I am really passionate about the game as well as careers in gaming. I have been playing the game since it came out in 2014 and have followed the team I am doing the documentary on since their first day to their last day in 2019. I would also say that this idea would be more interesting to work on for myself as I know a lot about the whole thing and would find researching a lot easier to do as well.
Project concept
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For this major project, my plan is to create an E-Sport documentary on a really successful and popular Counter-Strike team. Throughout the documentary I will have various clips playing, some which will be taken from YouTube or any other social media platform, whereas the rest will be self recorded in game or potentially outside too. To not make the documentary too plain and only have footage from in game and possibly from online I will want to also someone how add some own footage that I have captured to make the documentary more appealing to the audiences and more entertaining. If I don't manage for some reason to achieve creating my own footage I will need to make sure that they footage that I am using from in game or from online that I make it stand out as much as possible, this could be by using loads of effects to make it unique and enjoyable to watch. Towards the end of the documentary, I aim to have some sort of interview, hoping to be one of the players from the team, if not then someone just as relevant and important. Over all of the clips, I aim to have a paid actor that I will hire to read out a script I will have made for him. The sheer purpose of this is so that it has a better effect on the audience. I think having a paid actor with a good voice will definitely engage with the audience better and interest the audience more too. The main research I will have to do is into editing documentaries as well as into the actual creation and making of documentaries to understand the foundations and basics of making one. I will also have to do research into a specific software called HLAE (Half life After Effects) which is a program for Counter-Strike that allows you to smoothly record what is happening in game. This software is really hard to use and takes a lot of time and practice to master. I will also need to do research into actors that would be able to do voice overs for me as I need to find the perfect one that will suit the documentary as well as fit in my budget. When it comes to the clips in the documentary, I will edit some of them like a frag movie just for the effects it will have so that it will keep the audience entertained and interested. My aim for this documentary is to educate people about the organisation and their success. I also want to raise awareness to the people that to this day think that you cannot make a living from e-sport and gaming, even though e-sport at the moment is the fastest growing media and sports franchise, as well as there is a huge amount of sponsors that want to enter the franchise and support it. I also want to show the amount the team achieved playing with the same roster for such a long time, which has never been done before in Counter-Strike and possibly all of e-sport. I have already done some research into this project, mainly into the theoretical part, if video games cause violence where I was able to find a few case studies against the point that video games do cause violence and only one that agrees with the point which was an essay I found on ‘Ukessays’1. When it comes to the target audience for this project, it will mainly be teens and young adults aged from 14-25 as that I think is the main age group that play this game and follow the e-sport scene. I think that, the main gender that I will aim at will be male as majority of the players and supporters in the game are male. I also will target it at fans of the game and supporters of the team back in the day as well as targeting people that don’t support e-sport and don’t think you can have a career in gaming as I want to show that you actually can make a living from it. The first thing I will have to get done when creating this documentary is definitely getting the voice over all recorded and checked through with the actor. When it comes to other documentaries that I found really inspiration, then I would definitely have to say, 'The Last Dance' documentary was a huge inspiration for me. The main thing that I love about the way that documentary was made was the amount of people they got involved to get different points of view for certain questions or situations. Instead of only getting a couple people they managed to get 90 people. The reason why I loved this was because, it gives the audience a better view at the situation as well as giving the audience a lot more information and educating them more about the situation which is being spoken about. With the possibility of having an interview with someone in my documentary and due to the current situation and me not being able to fly to Poland to film the documentary with the person. I will need to make sure that when recording it, I will need to use a really good software that is able to manage good quality picture. I will also have to do test runs with the person, helping them setup their camera correctly so it looks good, making sure their microphone quality and levels are correct and finally making sure that the lighting in the video is good too. As this won't be filmed in a proper studio in Poland like I originally planned it to be, it will be harder to get the same quality and will require a lot of work with the person I will be interviewing to make sure the outcome and the look of it is still top quality. My layout for this documentary is pretty straight forward and can easily be seen on my 'Research' page where I have written out in detail. Personally, when it comes to the look of my documentary I think that the main thing that will make it look good if the effects and they way I will edit it that will make it stand out. I will make sure that each clip and each part is edited in some way and is unique. Main reason for this is that I want to still entertain and keep people drawn in that aren't huge followers of the sport or the community, so for that reason I need to make it stand out in some way and editing the clips I think will be the best way and that is what I think will look good in my documentary. The main thing I will focusing on when creating this documentary is my editing skills and that is something I will want to be marked on the most. I will need to make sure that my editing skills are on point due to the lack of huge amounts of my own footage in the documentary. As there will be quite a bit of used footage from online that I have found, I will need to make sure that when editing my documentary together I make it all stand out and make it look unique and not that I have just downloaded it from the internet and put it in, I will need to keep in mind transitions, effects and few other things I could possibly use to make the footage stand out. The core elemts that I will focus on when making this will be editing instead of the quality of footage as I think I lack some skill in the use of a camera. Also, due to Covid-19 there are certain restrictions that will stop me from capturing my own footage, real life interview in Poland for example.
Evaluation
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When it comes to evaluating my work and the progress I have made I will do what I have been doing for every project so far. Each lesson I will write myself a plan for what I want to achieve by the end of the lesson. At the end of the lessons, I will then reflect and explain what I did manage to achieve and what I might have not achieved and why. Next, I will write what I will do differently so that I can achieve all of the things I set myself to achieve next lesson. I think this is the best way for me to evaluate my work as well as my progress I am making as I will clearly be able to tell if I’m doing enough each lesson or not. I will make sure that I write everything in detail and not briefly so that I can easily reflect on it and understand what I will need to do next. All of this will be written on the website, clearly stating it’s my ‘Lesson Plan’ section. As well as evaluating it myself, every 2 or 3 days I will ask my supervisor to have a look at my work so far and give me feedback if I’m doing enough, too much or not enough and of course any changes that I could make. I will need to make sure I get all this feedback so that I can achieve the best piece of work I can and present it on time as well.
Strategies
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When it comes to strategies to become successful I definitely need to create a good timetable for this project so that I can achieve everything on time and without too much stress. Personally, I think working during lockdown is a bit harder for me, as I tend to lack motivation and find it harder to get settled and start with the work. The only benefit I would see is that the environment of work is better as I’m at home safe which is a good and bad thing as at times it can get a bit too comfortable which results in avoiding work and just relaxing. Other strategies that I will need to develop will be different editing skills, mainly ones that create a cool effect on the audience as I don’t want my documentary to be boring and plain. I will make it simple but want it to stand out as well.
Finally, my action plan and timetable for this project is pretty long. After coming back from term break, for the first couple of weeks I will be doing all of my necessary research I need to have done. I will need to research all of the skills I will need to create this documentary, I will also research all the software I will need to use for the production process as well as if there is any new software that I haven’t touched before, I will need to learn how to use it so that I am confident when I get into production. I will also research any actors for my voiceover that I will need, I will need to look into their pricing, availability, voice and how long it will take them to record the send over the finished product. I will also need to research any possible people for the interview I want to possibly include in my documentary. When researching this I will also have to look at their pricing if they would charge for an interview and when they would be available for an interview. Other than researching direct things that I will need to create this documentary, I will also research things that make a documentary successful as well as not successful and will have to evaluate if mine has any non-successful factors and look at the possibility of adding things that will make it more successful. After finishing the research phase, I will then move onto pre-production phase which is where I will create the script for my actor, possibly create a script for my interview, I will also create a schedule for production time so I know what I will be doing each day and what I will be focusing on. Finally, during pre-production time I will need to create a shotlist so I know what each shot will look like. When it comes to production week, I will spend the first couple of days working on the intro and thumbnail for the video. Next, I will go onto the start of the documentary after that moving onto the description of the individual player. Finally, I will move onto the downfall part of the team and possibly also include the interview with a few questions about the team. In post-production I will be doing any special effects or any final touches after sending the rough cuts to my supervisor for some feedback. Finally, when I finish making the documentary and have it signed off, for the last couple of days before the deadline, I will be working on the evaluation, evaluating my work going over what was good, bad, what I could have improved and what I’m proud of.
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1
UKEssays. (November 2018). Video Games Cause Violence And Behavior Problems Psychology Essay. Retrieved from https://www.ukessays.com/essays/psychology/video-games-cause-violence-and-behavior-problems-psychology-essay.php?vref=1
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16138171.2018.1559019
Schedule
Week 1 & 2
For week 1 & 2 I will be focusing only on my first initial ideas and proposal. During these 2 weeks I will need to come up with 3 ideas for an FMP and describe them. I will then have to select 1 of them and write a proposal about it.
Week 3, 4 & 5
During these 3 weeks I will be focusing on doing all of my research for my project.
For week 3 (22/2/21) I will focus mainly on researching all of the software that I might need to use to edit this project and make it look good. I will also research editing techniques, effects, colour grading etc so that I can make the documentary look the best it possibly can. I will also research all the skills I will need to achieve a successful and good looking documentary as well as learning the skills and documenting it all.
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For week 4 (1/3/21) I will move onto focusing on doing research on the team and slowly getting information ready for my script. I will have to do a lot of research, firstly I will have to research the organisation, how it became one, who created it when etc. I will then move onto each individual player, researching them and their life before and after joining the team. Finally, I will move onto researching the downfall of the team and why the team fell apart. Mainly, just looking for information that support the ideas of why the team split as well as other factors that could of led to this stage.
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For week 5 (8,3,21), I will move onto researching actors for my voice over and getting in contact with them to find out their budgets, availability and how quick they could record and send the finished piece over. I also will research people that I could get in for a possible interview, this could be the actual players that I'm doing the documentary on or people related to them like commentators, coaches, mangers etc.
Week 6 & 7
For these two weeks in pre-production I will focus on writing the script as well focusing on finding the footage that I will use as on overlay for the VoiceOver that I will have.
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For week 6 (15/3/21), I want to focus mainly on the script as I want to get that done ASAP and sent over to the actor so that he can record it and send it back before the production week preferably. I will be doing the script in 3 parts and sending them over to the actor in 3 parts (Beginning, Players, Downfall) just so that I can at least get some VoiceOver footage for production in case he is late. If I end up doing an interview, after finishing writing the script for the VoiceOver I will then write a script for my interview.
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For week 7 (22/3/21), I will focus on finding all of the footage that I will have playing under the VoiceOver. I will spend a lot of time finding footage from the internet as well as recording my own footage, which will be recording moments within the game. During this week I will also want to create myself some sort of drawn illustration of how I plan to make the documentary look like, mainly want to have the intro drawn and some other key elements. During this week, if I end up doing an interview this is the week where I will record the interview with the person.
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Week 8, 9 & 10
These 3 weeks are going to be extremely busy and will need me to put a lot of work in. This will be the 3 weeks where I will be putting all of the clips together editing the VoiceOver all of the clips as well as a possible interview.
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Week 8 (12/4/21), I plan on starting recording and making of the intro for the video as well as moving onto the beginning of the documentary. First, I will start on making the thumbnail and the intro to the documentary. This should take me no longer than 2 days maximum. The importance of the thumbnail is so that it makes the video stand out on YouTube when people are scrolling about. For the next couple of days I will be focusing on the beginning of the documentary where I will be putting all the clips regarding the making of the team and its history together, as well as editing in the VoiceOver. At the end of the week I will send over what I have made so far to my supervisor for feedback and evaluation.
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For week 9 (19/4/21), I will be focusing on finishing the beginning of the interview and moving onto the individual players.. This week I will be putting all of the clips together as well as the VoiceOver and adding effects, I don't want to add too much stuff as there still will be a lot to edit and I want it to all to make sense. The more editing that gets done the more effects I will add and play around with the looks of the documentary. At the end of the week, again I will be getting feedback and evaluation from my supervisor.
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For week 10 (26/4/21), I will aim to finish of the individual player section and move on to the ending (as well as possible interview) section of the documentary. Here, once again, I will be adding the footage I have either found or recorded as well as editing the voice over. As this will be the end of the documentary I will be able to spend some time adding effects into the video and playing about with the overall look and feel of it. Towards the end of the week once again I will my supervisor for feedback on my work and evaluation on the first complete rough edit.
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Week 11
For week 11 (3/5/21), I will focus on the evaluation from the supervisor which I will be constantly getting with each rough edit I send him and the improvements I will make. I aim to have done enough rough edits that week to have a final edit ready and complete awaiting submission.
Week 12
Week 12 (10/5/21), this will be the final week of the whole project and the most stressful one for sure. I will need to make sure that I am calm the whole week and don't forget to do something really important. I will spend the whole week doing evaluations as well as getting all my work ready for submission and a final hand in.