Personal reflective comment

Personal reflective comment

My role in the group while making our James Bond interactive YouTube game was the Director. It was my job to make sure all the props and equipment were collected. I went out to purchase multiple items of clothing for the characters to fit in with the story and theme of the 'James Bond game. 

I took the job of making sure we had an actual story and narrative for our game. This meant doing research on our target audience (primary research), doing research on where we will be filming (location scouting) and making a storyboard and script.

The others in the group made the questionnaire after as a group we discussed what questions were needed to get the answers I could analyse to create the best story I could. The results we got suggested people would want motives behind their decisions and would want more quick time events.

            During the process of finding a place to film I tried to base my story around a house or a woodland area but these would be too far away or would not fit into the James Bond feel enough. After some looking I found the ‘ghost tunnels’ on Portland that looked great for a villain hideout.

            The storyboard was based off of the questionnaire results we received. The storyboard had all the details that would be in a professional storyboard, the type of shot it is, how long it goes on for, what goes on in the shot and a picture of what the shot should look like.

           

During filming we had to improvise with some shots due to the large amount of broken glass on the dirty floor in the dark and damp environment of the ghost tunnels and there not being enough room directly outside the entrance to the ghost tunnels. We also had to improvise with the environment we worked in by using rocks as a table.

I managed each shot as well as actually acting out several roles as the 'bad guys', moving the group along as fast as possible. We did have to stray away from the storyboard a bit due to health and safety reasons and also purely because we had a dirt bike we could use for our final shot we took the opportunity to have our James Bond drive away.

In the storyboard most of our shots were POV, filmed with the GOPRO camera. This went well until the GOPRO battery died before we could film the last scene. Luckily we had the HXR camera with us so we could film the fight scene from a mid shot to mid-close up perspective. This meant in the end we did have to show our bond characters face a bit more than we wanted to as we wanted our players to feel more in the characters shoes than watching someone else play.

            As the director I did a good job at pushing the team to film as fast as possible and keep as close to the storyboard as possible. We made sure to set up ‘filming in progress’ signs and to clean up after ourselves to keep the public safe and happy and we managed to finish on time with all the filming done in one day.

The filming had to be cancelled from our original date of Feb 12^th to the half term holidays because our Producer could not make it on time. This forced us to film way behind schedule and it put a lot of pressure on the whole team to get the editing and special effects done. We had a lot of effects we wanted like blood splatter and extra flash effects that we had to avoid doing, as it would simply take too much time to do. The postproduction was put under a lot of stress because of this and we had to work towards the deadline rather than have it completed one week before like we had originally planned in our schedule.

Towards the end of the project our Producer, Adam stopped communicating with us. He stopped answering text messages and phone calls and he did not join the Facebook page we set up early in the project to keep communication inside the group and he did not post all his important documents on the group Dropbox which hindered our capabilities of written work as we had no reference to the documents he was seemingly keeping from us. This is due to the fact he fell very ill towards the end of the project and the area he lived in had very bad connection so Adam could not receive text messages and calls.  This meant we had to make some changes, as it seemed our producer was gone for a while.

This is why I was made the new Producer so I could keep tabs on the whole group and make sure we had all the written work and editing done. I supplied the group with content that would help them in their tasks and made sure to do as much written work as I could to help with the group.

Drew did all the editing and he was doing a great job at it. I assigned graphical and written work to Kia and Scott while I did a lot of written work and helped out in individual tasks. Me pushing the group and assigning jobs put the group on the right track towards completion in a much less ‘panicky’ working environment’. Without the Dropbox and Facebook page, along with Skype chat we would have been in serious trouble. They were both out main way of communicating with each other and for me, making sure the group was doing their part.

Overall the group did a great job at making sure we had permission to film, gathering research, props and equipment, filming at a professional and fast pace and editing the final product. We constantly double checked our sources and risk assessments and made sure to keep good communication in the whole group despite some bad connection issues.