Process: Final day of class!

As the title suggests, today was the last day of class. For our class today, we ate donuts (kindly provided to us by our academic advisor, Patrick Love) and watched our masterpieces. Our class has 4 groups in total so we spent the day watching all 4 videos and having a short Q & A session after each viewing.

The first video we watched was about a band called "Big Money, Spare Change". The documentary had footage of interviews with the members and also some B-roll of them jamming. The audio used was quite decent though at certain times the background music would override the interviewee's voice. There was also some inconsistency in their video quality but nothing that was really bad.

The video by the second group was regarding the kendo club. They chose a very interesting group to study however the audio used was not very good quality so I had a hard time understanding what was being said. Also, they never did tell us the role of the people they are interviewing have in the club.

The video by the third group was about a debate club. The quality of the interviews were very good but I was slightly annoyed by the background music that they used. They also got some pretty good shots of the debate in action and their transitions were quite good too!

Our group showed our video last and I am quite proud of what we have accomplished . Hopefully other viewers will think so too! J

Reflection: Week 5

Throughout this entire documentary process, I learned a great deal about discourse communities and the misconceptions outsiders can have about such communities. When we started this project, and Jim first mentioned studying the League of Legends club, I instantly envisioned small, pale people that sat in their rooms all day and night, alone, starting at a laptop screen, which was in part to the few people I knew that actively played League of Legends. But after meeting the officers and general members of the club during filming, I found out that almost every single player participates in a wide variety of other activities. One member plays baseball and flies airplanes, while the other plays golf, tennis and rides horses in her spare time. Moreover, every single person we interviewed said that they play League of Legends to interact with their friends, meaning they see it as a activity of social interaction, not quiet isolation, as I had envisioned.

Learning these things about the members of the club made me realize that my stereotypes were completely ridiculous, as they were not based off of anything even remotely concrete. The process of creating this documentary also helped me to be more open minded towards active players of any game, which I sometimes have difficulty doing, since I was not permitted to play any sort of video game growing up. Overall, I enjoyed the project immensely and gained new insight, not only from a technological standpoint, but also from a personal standpoint.

Process: Week 5

We spent our final week of the semester editing the final touches of our League of Legends documentary, after having already assembled a rough cut of the entire video the week before. On Monday, we realized that to fit everything in, we would inevitably have to exceed the five minute mark. We also determined that we needed more transitions, as it was difficult to follow where exactly our documentary was going as it played. Our overall goal was to introduce how the community functions, reveal the misconception that League of Legend's gamers sit alone in their room all day on their computer, and then dispel that misconception by showing that the majority of the LOL club members play to socially interact with their friends. As of Monday, each of these main points was clearly addressed in our documentary, but their was nothing tying them all together, making it clear what our thesis was. For example, it was not immediately clear that the last section of the video was dispelling the misconception that was introduced in the second section of the video.

As of Monday, we decided that we needed additional footage of the game as well as someone playing the game. We needed this footage for the section of the documentary that explained what League of Legends was and how the game worked. To gather this footage, I recorded my roommate playing League of Legends in our room, on Wednesday. During this time, I was also able to capture a shot of him playing in the dark, so all you see is a glowing screen. This shot is perfect B-roll for our interview with Amanda, when she states that most people think that LOL gamers just gather in a dark room to play all day.

After recording a few more voice-overs later in the week, we were able to integrate transitions that made the entire documentary's argument much smoother than it was before.

Reflection Final Week

I have learned a lot doing this project. I have learned not to discriminate against other groups of people. I am not going to judge others by what group they are in. I thought everyone in the LOL group was going to be huge nerds who don’t do anything but play games. It was very eye opening to see how social the people in the club were and how many outside activities they perform. When you watch our documentary you can notice that all of the members did things outside of the club.

Making this documentary has actually inspired me to download and play the game. I tried to download it but my computer wouldn’t allow it. It was the idea that I was going to play it though. The fact that I thought only nerds played this and I tried to play it is evidence in itself. All these kids seem perfectly normal. I recommend this game to anyone who has some free time and wants to have some fun.

The completion of this documentary is the official end of our English class. The day we turned in the documentary was the last day of class and this will be my last post on this blog. We have worked hard to accurately represent the club and try and eliminate the common stereotype people have about the club. I hope that by reading this we have given your insight on how the LOL club operates and what they are about.

Documentary: Youtube link

http://youtu.be/sMkyU02UrGM

Refelction: Final Week

     As finals approaches, our English final project is also coming to an end. Over the past month, I learned how to use I-Movie from all the basic and step by step, we will have our final product ready to play. I am really exciting about the last class, not only because we are going to show our video to all the people in the class and this video is open for public, but also I am going to see all the videos our whole class has been working on science April.
     As this day, while I am doing the final check for our video and making sure this is going to be the best over all the groups from our class. I also looked back and think what I have learned from this class through this semester. I learned how to use I-Movie, which will serve me well over my life because this skill is going to come handy. And then I understand how to film a documentary video such as the angle of the camera, the space between the person and the background. More importantly, I understand the importance of B-roll, which I always saw in any type of media and never understand it until this class. Then earlier we were learning about communities and the conditions of become a part of a community. We have learned about rhetorical situations, what I never thought was important in my life because I never thought there is even a world "rhetorical" and gladly our class have go over this words enough and I finally learned how to spell this words correctly.
     Finally, I really enjoyed doing this project, also I learned what I came for this class.

Reflective: Story boards, filming logs and iMovie

This week, which is also the last week before the documentary is due (time flies so quickly!), is to be spent focusing on editing the video. Here, things we learnt in class comes in handy and convenient us when editing our videos.

Last week, we learnt about story boarding where we draw out what we picture a scene to be. Story boarding proves to be very useful as we can get to explore new ideas and perspectives. Furthermore, it also saves us a lot of time when editing the video as we already have a picture of what we want to achieve, thus making us more organized.

We also used a filming log for our raw footage. Filming logs are records of what happens during the video, its duration and whether it is good quality footage or not. These are extremely useful when editing videos as we can refer to the filming logs to find out when a person talks about something that we want instead of having to watch the entire video to find that specific  clip which is very time efficient.

The extra practice we had with iMovie during classes allowed us to be able to edit our videos using iMovie with minimal amount of problems (having a group member who is very familiar with iMovie also helps a whole lot!). During this time, we experimented with transitions, audio and video editing, adding in B-roll and texts. We also found out that having background music is unnecessary when the interviewees are talking as it would only distract the audience.