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.

Process: Final week

     Our one month work is finally coming to a complete. We have over 5 minutes of video so far and it is about to finish before Friday. We are going to upload the link of our video on our blog and anyone if welcome to check it out.
     I am trying to get as much followers as possible to our blog because I think our whole group did a great job on this project and also put our affects into it. I am sharing the link on both Google+ and Facebook. So far we have about 21 followers and I think we can determinately get more. I am going to ask some of my friends tonight because all of this project is going to end on Friday and there is a lot of things I need to take care of besides this blog and the project.
     I think this week is really exciting because this is the last week of school. It is good to feel we are finally achieve the gold we set up in the beginning of this project. I believe the class in Friday will be fun because we will see all the products each group has made and it is good to see what we have done.

Process Final/Most Awesome Week

The documentary is coming together finally. This is the last week for us to edit it and we are going to finish on time. We are pretty much all done with the film, we just need to add a few more things and tweak it a little. We took a few parts out of it though to make it a little clearer. There was a part in our documentary when there was just a black wall. This was supposed to bring humor to the film, but we decided to take it out to increase our professionalism. We are currently working on the transition to clean those up so everything goes together smoothly. After the class today we want to be completely finished with the documentary. We may need more video clips though, if so Kyle is going to get some more footage to put in. We need to put some kind of intro into our film. We need to explain what LOL is, so people who don’t play know what we are talking about.

When you watch the documentary you can see one of our group members. Jim, the most important group member, is in it. He is in the B-roll showing the kid in a room playing LOL. We are very proud of our presentation so we put a group member in it to show off. Jim has the most experience with LOL and we wanted to capture a true gamer in his natural habitat. I hope Jim is proud of being in this documentary…. he should be.

Process: Final Week

This is the final week so we will hopefully have our documentary completely finished by 3:30 on Friday. The whole process has been pretty interesting from start to finish. The actual filming process was pretty boring during the downtime but it was fairly enjoyable to actually film. The editing process was mostly done by Kyle, with the rest of the group giving input. I believe that our documentary will definitely accomplish the purpose we set out to as far as the portrayal of the Purdue League of Legends club. The documentary should be interesting and entertaining for our viewers and should give them the impression that the League of Legends club is a friendly place and that lots of different people go there. If we could show our finished documentary to the entirety of Purdue, I feel that the club would benefit in a lot of ways. The documentary should be showing the club in a good light, and should make it look like a community that is fun to be a part of, perhaps if the right people view it our video could even help the club to gain new members. Hopefully this will happen as that would be a positive effect we had on the club.

 I feel that the process of making this documentary has been helpful and if I ever make a documentary in the future this experience will have been very useful experience. Learning about and using the filming and editing techniques from this class have been interesting and I would not be opposed to doing another similar project in the future.

Reflective : Final Week

Last week we reviewed previews of the other groups projects, they were all pretty rough. It might have simply been because of the noise in the room, but from what I saw, none of the narratives in the videos were very clear. Looking at our rough documentary compared to the other groups I feel that we are in a good spot, especially because we have a good idea of where we want to go from where we are. Since it is easier to critique the work of other groups, it is a good idea to look at the things I did not like in other groups videos and then make sure that we do not do any of those things in our documentary. One of the groups had an introduction that was a lot of B roll and it took quite a while to get rolling. Another video contained a lot of interviews but no B roll. The last groups video was all interview and it was only with one person. Obviously these are simply rough cuts so they are not going to be like any of the final copies, but we can learn a bit from looking at these faults. A few things I learned from watching the other groups videos: we should not overuse B roll, we should not underuse B roll, if we include any music when there is also other audio playing make sure it is quiet enough, and make sure to use multiple interviews. Doing all of these things help make the documentary more engaging as well as less confusing to watch. The goal of the documentary is to provide information and an opinion about a discourse community. If we want viewers to take in information and correctly interpret our opinion, we need to make the documentary clear and interesting. As of right now I feel that our documentary does a good job of explaining our position. We do not go into the mechanics of League of Legends at all really, we focus almost solely on the community, which will make the documentary easier to follow for people who do not know about the game. I feel that our documentary will be successful.

Reflection: Peer Review

     This week we spend one class time watching other group's videos and leaving notes to those groups about what we think about their video. The videos we have watched are all raw or "first draft" of this assignment. But we really enjoy this chance doing this work and I believe the time is worth for this whole class because I learned something from these videos.
     Although all the videos are incomplete but I can see some problems with other group's work throughout the understand of this assignment. All the groups have interest ideas and also the different focus of the communities in our university they have chosen for their topic of this project. It is interesting to learn these groups or clubs but the interview these other groups have done or the videos they have produced so far gives me some trouble following what the people are saying in these videos because I have no idea what the questions are. Also there is another problem these videos all share, 
there is no way to know what the people they were interview are because there is no subtitles about names,
position in the club. It is hard for me to know why they should interview these people because I do not know
these people are important and their words are president the whole club the groups are filming about.
     By the end of that class I believe everyone learned something from other group's video and also the feedback
other people left to our video help us understand what lacks of our video that our group members did not see
through the production process. I believe with all these experiences we have learned, our final video will be
great and I can not wait to see what it is going to look like.

Process: Week 4

     This week, we spent lots of time on editing our film through the I-movie on our lab computer. We have done good process and also I believe we had the best first draft out of our class. We follow the purpose of funny but with serious steps that meet the requirements of this assignment.

     We decide to start the intro of this movie with an exciting background music from Star War movie. And then by adding some good amount of B-rolls into this intro, it creates a good environment for the audiences of what they will expect from our video. After the intro, we start our main part of our video with interviews with the president and the vice-president of the LOL club. We want to audience to understand what this club is and what the purpose and common pole they share. We also want people to understand the point of this community by telling the audiences what these members are in their daily life. By doing these interviews from these members from the club, we hope to show what this club is about to the public.

Reflection: Two Discourse Communities

The League of Legends club is interesting when studied as a discourse community, as the League of Legends game, and as the club itself can be considered individual discourse communities. In terms of the game itself, League of Legends utilizes its own unique language. The game employs specific slang, such as OP, support, carry, OOM, and Leash. All of these terms have their own unique meaning within the context of LOL, and can be heard during any given game. Furthermore, players typically communicate with each other through the in-game chat or out of game video chat. The in-game chat function is native to the game and allows players to type text to one another. Since this is sometimes difficult during intense bouts of play, players that know each other will set up audio chats through programs like Skype or Oovoo. This unique method of communicating leaves player’s hands free, while still allowing them to talk to each other.

On the other hand, the League of Legends club at Purdue University is also a discourse community, as they employ methods of communication unique to their club. The club officers sets up meetings with general members through its Facebook page, and then they meet in person to play. This face to face interaction is unique to the club, as typical League of Legends players do not ever interact face to face, as the game is played online, allowing players to connect with people from all over the world without moving from their computer. The dual discourse community nature of our documentary subject has thus far proven beneficial for our project, as it provides us with plenty of material to discuss in the documentary.

Process: Week 4

We spent this entire week in the post-production phase of our project, editing together the raw footage we captured two weeks ago. A two minute rough cut of our narrative that revealed where we were going with our entire documentary was due on Friday. By Thursday, we had completed the first two minutes and six seconds of the documentary.

On Monday, we focused on the introduction sequence, for which I had already created a storyboard the week before. I imagined the introduction as a series of quick cuts of different locations that started with a broad focus and then with each cut, grew tighter and tighter. The sequence starts at the Purdue University sign in the engineering mall, then the entrance to Stewart Hall, the third floor hallway in Stewart, room 314, then the League of Legends club inside room 314. When we were editing the sequence together, we found a heartbeat sound effect that fit perfectly with the clip sequence. Although to complete the sequence, I still need the actual footage of the Purdue University arch.

After we finished putting together a rough cut of the introduction sequence, we starting chopping up the interviews into the general outline we had talked about during filming. The documentary is going to start by focusing on ‘outsiders’ think of the League of Legends club, painting a picture of the typical response that club member receive when they explain that they are in the League of Legends club. We are then going to spend the remaining 3-4 minutes of the documentary disproving that widely held belief. We will first show the multitude of other activities that different club members are involved in, and then we intend to reveal the reason why the majority of members belong to the club.

Reflection week 4

B-roll is extremely important when making a documentary. B-roll are clips that are not very specific and are basically used to make the presentation more interesting and to visualize a point you are trying to make. We have several long interviews in our documentary so we used B-roll to keep the audience interested in what we are trying to say. For example if your interview is talking about pizza it’s a very good idea to add in some B-roll of pizza or something to attract the eye of the audience to keep them interested. We asked the president what outside opinions of the club may be. His answer is about thirty seconds and would be really distracting if we had not put B-roll in it. When he explains himself we put two clips in so we can help the viewer’s visualize what he is talking about. When he is talking about the outside opinion on how the members in the club just sit in dark rooms and play LOL we snap to Jim sitting in a room playing the game. Again this helps the audience visualize what we are trying to convey. Another example in the same interview is when we talk about how people think they are all huge nerds and we go to a clip of someone who would be seen as a nerd. We have several more interviews toured the end of our presentation that still need B-roll to make them more effective.

Not adding B-roll to these parts at the end would be very bad, since generally the audience would tend to get bored toured the end of the piece. 

Process Week 4

Our group finished the two minute intro Wednesday and we are ready to show it to the class. It took a while to complete this short clip, but it shows. We all stayed after class to get it done. We worked together to get the final product that we are showing in class Friday. I am very excited to see everyone’s reaction when we unveil what our topic is when we show the video.

We showed our two minute intro and received our comments. For the most part we did a good job. There were a few mistakes, but that was anticipated, it was a rough draft basically. The mistakes we had were very small. The interview of the female was not documented accurately. In our rough draft it said that the girl was paid to be in the club, she wasn’t. We fixed it earlier but I guess it didn’t save. Another thing that was brought up in our peer review was the fact we had a lot of white noise in our presentation. There is a scene that doesn’t make a lot of sense. This scene is a short clip of a blank wall with fuzzy audio. This doesn’t need to be in our documentary and will probably be taken out. All we need to really do know is put in some B-roll and tweak it a little so it looks nice. I am confident that everyone will enjoy watching our presentation and will learn a lot about the community while watching it. 

Process: Update!

On Monday, we didn't have much time to do any video editing as the transfer of the files took a little longer than expected. In the end, we managed to make a very rough draft of what our introduction would be, which was better than nothing.

Then on Wednesday, we made much more progress as we had cut down on the B-roll footage so we had more time to edit and managed to make a rough draft which had a duration of 2 minutes and 15 seconds. The video starts with a very epic soundtrack and then leads to people's misconception about the community and finally ends with how the community is really like. We didn't get to do the entire plot as it was only a draft but it was a good start and we even managed to add a little humor into it!

Friday was the day that we had the chance to view the draft videos that were made by other teams in our class. The other teams' videos were all quite decent though occasionally my group and I were left wondering what we had just watched. I'm also proud to say that all the effort put in to make our video look high quality really paid off as we received a lot of good comments regarding them. However, we did encounter an embarrassing problem where the text that we edited earlier did not save so a rather ridiculous version of it was seen by the entire class (=_=). Hopefully that won't ever happen again in the future!!

Process: Editing Thus Far

Although I neglected to write a process blog last week, it would have contained very similar content to this one. We spent a lot of last week simply working on the best way to get our raw footage on and off the lab computers in an efficient manner. We also had brainstormed a good introduction to the documentary. This week we have begun actually editing. We made an introduction one day that was pretty awesome, essentially going from outside of the building where the club was playing to the actual room that they were in. We also included a nice bit of gameplay footage overlayed with the title of the documentary. On Tuesday in conferences we continued to brainstorm ideas for the documentary. I feel that we got a lot of good ideas in and that the discussion went really well. On Wednesday we worked on getting the rest of the two minutes we needed by Friday done, and I feel that our two minute "first draft" of our documentary is really good and that the feedback we receive from other people viewing it will be helpful to us. There are a couple clips that we have in this draft that we will certainly not be including in the final draft, mostly because they are contradictory to the points we are going to prove in the final documentary, though they are an amusing addition to this draft. The two minutes that we have together right now is pretty good as far as a first attempt. It might be a bit difficult for the viewer to really understand what the overall point is, it is a good baseline for the final project that we will be submitting next week, and we do have a lot of good clips left that we have not yet included in the documentary. I feel that we have accomplished more than we even needed to this week. Although our first iteration of the documentary is not as high quality as possible, we already have the final product mostly planned, and the way that we have the raw footage stored, it should be easy and fast to get everything done, we should have a fair amount of free time for extra revision or feedback. We may at some point put the video up as a private video and allow the club to view it and give us their feedback on it. This would be helpful for both parties for a lot of reasons listed in my reflective post from this week.

Reflective: Portrayal of Characters in Documentary

In both King of Kong and and Kahn's writing, we learned about the power of documentaries as far as their portrayal of people. In King of Kong, both Billy and Steve had negative things implied or stated about them. The referee guy came across as quirky or eccentric, but he was awesome so I did not feel that it was negative towards him. Steve was shown to be a man with a family that he ignored in favor of Donkey Kong, who had also never accomplished any of the things he worked towards in life. This is for the most part overshadowed by the way that they portrayed him in the rest of the movie, as it seemed he was supposed to be the protagonist. Billy basically got screwed by King of Kong. They decided to make him the antagonist to Steve and to make the viewer hate Billy. They even went as far as to make him look good in the beginning just so he would have that much further to fall through the rest of the documentary. He was at first shown to be the popular, talented guy who was very popular in the gaming community. Then, he was shown to be scared, passive-aggressive, and lazy. They even showed a random clip of Billy doing his hair in his bathroom in the morning, which was not very flattering. While all of these things did happen and the documentary makers had access to all of this, they also chose to put all of this information into the documentary as well as putting it in the video in the manner they did. They certainly had other information at their disposal and could have presented the film they did have in a different manner that did not portray Billy or Steve in such a negative light.

Kahn's writing is more unfortunate because he offended an old professor, which was clearly unintentional on his part. This, in addition to the portrayal in King of Kong shows us that we may use our video to purposefully show someone in a certain way, but also that we may unintentionally offend someone in a way that we had not considered.

Reflective: Lessons from King of Kong

A few weeks ago, we watched a documentary called "King of Kong" in class and as Kyle has posted earlier, may have given us an impression of their personality that may not have been true in real life. For example, Billy Mitchell was depicted as the bad guy and Steve Wiebe as the guy who was very talented but who also had been never successful in anything. They might not really be like that in real life which is why the way we depict people we film is very important.

As the community we are filming are the LOL club community, at the end of the day, we don't want viewers to have the impression of the people who we have filmed to be lifeless unsocialable people. That is why we include their hobbies in our documentary to show that they have a life outside the virtual world of League of Legends.

After watching King of Kong, we also learned that B-roll is very important but it must also be related. For example, King of Kong used B-roll of people in the arcade playing games. For our documentary, we would use B-roll of the building we filmed in and also of the club playing a LOL match.

Lastly, a documentary would be more interesting if it had a storyline in it, which was of Steve Wiebe trying to get a high score and getting recognized by the arcade community. However, since we only have 3-5 minutes to achieve this, we would present people's common misconception of the LOL community, and then progress to show how the community really is.

Reflection: Week 2 Lesson

Overall, there were two important lessons that my group and I learned from our filming experiences during week two:

Lighting: The first interview we conducted took place in my dorm room, where I test interviewed my roommate about League of Legends Club and his impressions and the clubs. I made sure that every light in the room was turned on a focused in his direction, yet the lighting in the final shot was still atrocious. This resulted in interview footage that would have legitimately detracted from the documentary, by making it uninteresting to look at. To remedy this issue, we scouted out locations before filming in Stewart and discovered that on the third floor, next to the windows, the ambient lighting was perfect for interviewing subjects. From then on, all of our interviews were conducted next to the largest window we could find in whatever building we were filming in.

Camera Malfunctions: On three separate instances, while interviewing members of the League of Legends club, our camera stopped recording mid-sentence. For the most part, we were able to remedy this issue by simply asking the subject the question over again. But in some cases, the answers were not of the same quality as the first take, which resulted in us losing valuable shots and quotes. We learned that we had to have one person solely dedicated to watching the ‘Writing Speed Buffer’ during recording, which indicates how quickly the camera is writing the video to the memory card.