New Media

New media was a key part in my documentary as online gaming is a relatively new medium to play games, particularly how it is done today over mass networks and servers. without this technology's existence i wouldn't be righting about this right now so it is incredibly significant. In terms of actual production i found having to film an actual xbox live game an interesting challenge as filming straight from the t.v can be difficult and in my research on ways to do this i learned about capture cards, however these were expensive but what they are is a small hard drive with a piece of soft wear that will record whole sessions of games, when u have captured the footage you want it simply plugs into your computer and the footage can be transfered into an editing medium.

combination of your main product and ancillary texts

The Radio Promo ties in with the main product quite nicely as it give a brief overview of what will be happening in the program and what kind of topics will be discussed over the documentary
The Article also ties in well commenting on some of the things that appeared in the documentary but not giving away to much, more of advertising the documentary to the reader of the magazine without giving to much away. hopefully drawing them in to watch the whole thing in its entirety
They both work together very well with the documentary to help promote and comment on the documentary without explaining to much to the view or reader so they will have to watch it for themselves to find out exactly what the documentary is trying to say and how it portrays online gaming

Audince Feedback

Using my HDMI cable i was able to plug my laptop into a t/v at home and show my documentary to the family and a few friends, by viewing my work on a larger screen any blemishes in the editing are more apparent.
From what feedback i got there were a few minor glitches with timing in the voice overs which were easily fixed
apart from that the documentary was well received, and the certain piece of footage i put in as a shock element worked incredibly well, they thought the documentary was well broken up and set out in a sensible order, they also seemed to like how i had hidden the identity of the presenter for a time, and this is also a sometimes used convention of documentaries where they will have a panning shot of an area with the general layout of the documentary explained and when an important point that the director wants the audience to pick up on the presenter is show as a sort of 'focus on what i am saying' point.

there was a comment about 'using a shocking image at the start rather than at the end so viewers don't have that as the final image in there head and are able to make a more 'educated' decision about what they think'
this piece of feedback was good as it showed that my intentions had worked as i thought having a shocking image at the end would result in a more bias view towards the topic at the end.
The documentary shows clips of real video games being played, they only show what the player playing would see in an attempt to immerse the views for 1 of 3 reasons that slowly becomes more clear as the documentary goes on, these are to either show how bad games are, show that games are just harmless fun or act as nothing but a reference point for people who play games to sort of keep them entertained and make them pay a little more attention

Use of Conventions

In making this Documentary i decided to follow most of the conventions used by documentaries including several defined by Michael Rabiger in his book 'Directing Documentaries' such as developing an audiences knowledge of a certain topic and not containing any 'neutral' information.

However i also challenged his convention of a confrontation between opposing forces which then reaches a climax and is resolved. The argument posed through out the documentary is given to the view to resolve for themselves based on what they have heard from the documentary.

I think the idea of giving the view the final say in what they think is very important as that is what the documentary is about, presenting information to the viewer and giving them the final say in what they think instead of telling them what they think like general media does a lot.
This doesn't only challenge his convention of resolution but the narrative arch theory where the story has a clear ending and conclusions are met, where as for my documentary although there is an end no real conclusion is made.

In terms of my radio promotion i tried to follow many of the conventions as possible such as asking questions and giving precise information about where the advertised artifact can be found.

For my T.V Listings article does subvert the stereotypical layout of magazines as on one pages is the article and on the other is a collage of familiar gaming icons. Although this is a subverted convention at the moment i do believe this kind of layout for articles such as mine is beginning to be used more in certain types of magazines such as T.V listings magazines

Technology

A Laptop
DVD's
Camera
Tripod
MAGIX Movie Editing Software
External Harddrive

Alot of people in my media class decided to edit their footage on the Apple macs however I decided to use my own software as I was more comfertable with it and I find it much easier than using a mac. This is another reason I used my own laptop than a mac as I was just more used to using a pc rather than a mac.

I used the external hard drive to store large amounts of video footage as both backup and tranportation incase I need to move the footage to another computor for what ever reason.

DVD's are the standard medium of storing the final product.

The tripod came in handy for filming long periods of time where I was not moving and it worked (almost) like a makeshift steady cam for tracking shots. I had a small tripod and a large tripod.

The camera was also my own and I find it was more convienient than the school cameras because they recorded onto a tape rather than a harddrive or an SD card meaning I would have to use the school computers to edit the footage as I didn't have the right port on my laptop to transfer the footage from the camera to my laptop. Also I found with the tapes where they had been used alot the tapes would be slightly jumpy inplaces meaning the footage was not usable.


I also used a new piece of technology called Google Docs which allows me to upload files onto the internet. It is also easier to add the files into the blog as i can just paste a link to the file into the blog and whoever is reading the file can then click the link to open up the file in a new window.