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1. Evaluation
Mel Nuttall

2. I created my factual film in the classic documentary style by combining a mixture of
taken in game footage and interviews. When it came to a narration, I used my voice
to put across what I wanted to say but without showing my face at any point. I
interviewed two people who I knew played different kinds of games and therefore
say different things in the interviews.
One modern and unique characteristic of my production was the use of in game
voice chat and in game footage. With this being a fairly new feature that would be
available on even simple devices, it meant I had a greater variation in the type of
camera viewpoints I could use, rather than just having a camera on a tripod behind
me to capture the whole laptop and the screen of limited quality. It also enabled me
to be able to record multiple recordings in 10 minute bursts which made finding and
editing the clips I wanted to use were much easier and I didn’t have to worry about
the camera storage SD card running out of memory because the videos were saved
to my desktop where I could easily transfer them onto a memory stick.
Another thing that I did was include different age demographics. I wanted to show
that it wasn’t just people my age that played video games and that there were
different kinds of games that different people played. To do this I interviewed people
of different ages and who played different styles of games because then it meant my
video could appeal to multiple age ranges.

3. I took quite a bit of inspiration from the products that I researched, but I tried to make
sure that I took them as ideas from other ones without seemingly just copying the
already existent videos.
When comparing my video to the second product that I researched, by The Game
Theorists, the main thing that I found to be similar was content. While the styles were
different since mine presented the information in a much more serious way that is
typical in a factual production, rather than to be comedic and entertaining from that
perspective. This channel was popular and seemed to be aimed at younger audiences
and the aspect of being as funny as it was educational. While this is something I
considered, I wanted mine to be a bit more serious, and left a point of possible
comedy rather than it being consistent throughout. The video was edited a lot more
intensely and more experienced than mine was. A lot of that was for the comedic
aspect but it’s clear that they had more time and knowledge on how to edit in that
way. Theirs however, didn’t involve any interviews, although it wouldn’t have really
needed them given the style and there were multiple narrators.

4. The video by GamerHubTV definitely followed more of the style that I was thinking of
in my head. The use of a talking head interview and overlaying gaming footage while
the interview goes along is the style I ended up using, although I used more than one
interview and had their faces were only shown at the beginning and at the end of
when they spoke. But besides that, we both used similar cuts between shots and using
clips of gaming to break up with what the interviewer is saying. On the other hand, the
actual content is different. I focused on why gamers were drawn to them, whereas this
video was based on an addiction to video games.
Bluebarian made a video on the same topic that I did, and was quite similar to The
Game Theorists’ in terms of being for entertainment as much as education. However,
this video was more similar to mine with how the video was structured. The music was
similar too, by starting with one song and once the direction of the video changed
slightly, the music changed to fit and make what the narrator said more effective. The
use of humour was a little easier to understand than The Game Theorists’ and I took it
as inspiration to add a little bit of it to my own video to break it up slightly. But I
purposefully didn’t use too much humour since I didn’t design it to be like a video on a
YouTuber’s entertainment channel, but a factual project that’s main focus was making
my points with my narration and talking head interviews.

5. I think that something that I wasn’t pleased with in my video was the actual quality of
my video. One main thing was the eventual overall quality of my video. Whether this
was due to the lighting of the room I used for the interviews at that particular time of
day or when exported out of Premiere, but quite a lot of the video quality was lost
somewhere and I didn’t know until after I had exported it, without a lot of time to be
able to do much about it. Especially on my second interview, the light ended up falling
onto the wrong part of her face which made it look dark. While this wasn’t a problem
when it was just her voiceover, when we could see her, it didn’t look the best in terms
of camera quality.
Another weakness I found, was that my voiceover was rather quiet and, in some
places, difficult to understand. As this was my first time recording a voiceover, knew
that it would need several takes and cutting the best parts out of each one to use.
However, when it came to editing, I found my whole production to be quiet and I
struggled to get my narration loud and clear enough without being drowned out by
everything else but the video as a whole still audible.

6. A strength of my factual production was my use of different age demographics and
how different ones, in this case, played on different platforms in terms of games to
each other. I didn’t want to just focus on one age range or just one style of games, but
a selection to show how games can be used across all generations rather than just
children and young adults.
Another thing that I liked about my film was my title screen. I enjoyed learning how to
do the effect to have text behind part of my video on screen. However, throughout the
time I spent making this possible, I was unhappy with how it looked as each point
wouldn’t always sit where I wanted it too and so the effect didn’t look real. So I went
through every fame in that bit of footage that I wanted to use to try and get the effect
as close as to what I wanted it to be. Eventually, once I was finished, I was pleased
with how it turned out as it was subtle but still a nice effect.

7. When it comes to my future productions, I’ll definitely try to be more strict and
precise when it came to planning. With this video, filming the interviews became quite
rushed and unorganised due to actually having the time to get them all set up. In the
future, I will have a more reliable plan date for interviews and do them as early as
possible. Then I can avoid one of the people I was going to interview being ill and film
at a later date without running out of editing time.
Hopefully then, with more carefully timed managing, I will be able to have a less
stressed and rush filming process which will mean that I can take my time and have
more footage to work with. This wasn’t always the case with my factual production,
where I relied mostly on clips from the game Overwatch for the viewers to watch
while I narrated. If given the chance, I would take more time to get different games so
that the viewer doesn’t get bored of seeing videos from predominantly one game.