Audio And Visual Techniques: Video Montage Evaluation

Video editing has never been a strong feature of mine despite my interest in the subject, so the opportunity to work on a project such as this was a welcome thing. The assignment offered a casual look at the video editing software “Final Cut” with a manageable final outcome at the end. Video editing for me previously has been almost entirely orientated around the software “Adobe Premier”. Despite Premier being a very powerful editing kit I found it also to be fairly cumbersome and a hassle to navigate the work space, with things shuffled about from the familiarity of other Adobe products. Final Cut I found just as difficult to navigate at first but learnt where things were much quicker. Once I had my head around the layout of the interface and roughly how things were organized I found it to be a much more convenient and of more intuitive a design than that of Premier.
Moving image since the dawn of television has been a beacon of light shining the way for technology. We ride the achievement of the television over that of the space programme and it has become ever more prevalent in society as time goes on, I see no reason for it to slow. Video editing is a very important part of moving image and something I have never even tried to get any real proficiency at. This project has been an important step into a better understanding of video editing techniques, something I would most definitely like to pursue further with future projects.
I am not often one for working in groups and usually find the notion somewhat daunting, in this case however it was welcome. Up until now I have not been involved in any proper group work (despite this work being more duo than group). I enjoyed working alongside Olly, although our first dive into this project was primarily from separate work with communication of ideas over email.
Our first week or so was spent sending emails to and from; discussing the possibilities of various ideas concerning the different words with which we had to orient our outcome with. Our second week we both drafted ideas of what it was we thought the end piece should look like. We chose the word “routine” from the list and decided on trying to convey the idea of routine through a varying degree of mediums within the video. We chose to portray a narrative of routine centred around the aspects of life, mundane and repetitive, without using footage that directly implied this. The aim was to edit the entire thing in such a way that the utilised footage was to be less relevant than how we edited it together; a message through the timing and organization of the footage rather than the footage itself, so to speak.
In the following week we merged our rough ideas together to form a final piece, working together at college and then finally at Olly's house. However, we did end up using Premier software, after converting all the footage we needed, as we were working from a PC. Collecting our thoughts together from the rough ideas we had initially created was difficult and excruciatingly tedious as, in combining a lot of our work, we hadn't taken into account the many possibilities in the final elements of design. We hit many an unhealthy bump in the road when trying to cut our footage together, for example keeping things fluid and without strange ghosts and artefacts (of which there were many) from other seemingly hidden layers of video.
The end result is pleasing, we have created a rhythmic and vastly hypnotic experience of a life sequence that has stayed pretty much consistent throughout development. I think the way we edited and (in particular) the timing we used to transit between the various footage gives a great impression of repetition and the passing of irrelevant time. I was particularly proud that we didn't get sucked into using any of the horrid but easily appliable 'effects' that offer themselves through Premier. However I would have liked to explore the use of sound further in the production, perhaps touching on creating music with short segments of audio stolen from within the clips. Another one of my concerns is that the video may need a couple of decent viewings before the true message that we were trying to portray can be understood. The video isn't really interesting enough for more than one sitting which makes understanding it a slight problem for those who don't have Olly or myself there to explain it.
As far as the narrative of the video goes we were trying to sequence all our footage to the beat of “travel, work, travel, leisure” and for the best part I think we managed this. The segmented and short flashes of the relevant footage creates a very powerful suggestion of what each part of the video is about. The way we organised and timed the shots however leaves the viewer without fully understanding the message. Cutting it up again with the sharp noise and repeating escalator footage intervals really creates a very strange and unnerving day-dream-like atmosphere to the entire creation. This however is precisely the sort of effect we wanted to demonstrate. A sort of insight into to how we thought life goes on, but of course... the viewer probably can't quite work that out without some help. Maybe a draw back to it's design? I'm not so sure, but this is a direction of conveying ideas that I would like to explore in the future. Slight implication, not blunt and forced opinion.
I think our achievement was in creating an excellent first attempt, but hopefully not last, video production. It is obvious to me what it is I would have to improve on in further video editing projects, and what it is that I have learnt in terms of overall information media design. There were a lot of ideas and concepts that I shall expect to surface again in future projects.

The Importance of Play

As part of this study I’m going to be looking at two texts, they are “A Theory of Fun” by Raph Koster and an article published in the International Journal of Computer Game Research that I found particularly interesting; “The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens” by Hector Rodriguez.

Both texts differ massively from the very basic ‘A Theory of Fun’ to the very long winded study of ‘Huizinga’s Homo Ludens’.

‘A Theory of Fun’ was written by Raph Koster and was based on a presentation that Koster gave at the Austin Game Conference in 2003. Koster is American born (1971-) and is most notably the lead designer of Ultima Online and Author of this book.

Dr. Hector Rodriguez is a New York University graduate with a doctorial degree in the field of cinema studies and is now an associate professor at NYU.

The article that I am studying however is the examination of “Homo Ludens” by a one “Johan Hyuzinga”, a Dutch historian who was one of the founders of modern cultural history (the combined study of anthropology and history to examine popular culture). Homo Ludens is Hyuzinga’s discussion of the influence and importance of ‘play’ on European culture.

There is something in both texts, despite their obvious differences that is agreed upon and is best summed up by Rodriguez as “The player must respond to some event, in the context of a structured situation. Playing consists in a trans-individual process of action and reaction, which often takes on a to-and-fro quality reminiscent of dance.” That is to say that play is a dynamic interaction between player and event that is either counter or imply and follows to a new set of rhythmic events. The main difference is that while Hyuzinga would rather notion towards play being a mundane experience that is simply lived for the very sake of it and Koster implying that play is, although mundane in appearance, actually the mind testing itself through cause and effect so that it may better improve through experience. Koster believes that play is education in such a format that the mind rewards our senses for achieving goals. The structured format of play is simply how our mind best receives the information.

Applying what I’ve learnt from these texts to the production of my game in the case of ‘A Theory of Fun’ was very interesting to do. Koster, although implying very little that we couldn’t deduce ourselves, set about reaffirming and challenging the notion of games beyond that generic and ‘mundane’ word ‘play’. He would like to see games seen as obstacles we pose ourselves for very serious reasons. He outlined good games in his work as puzzles that bare real life relevance. A good example of this is chess. One of our oldest games and still more than popular it was created as entertainment and played by kings no less. It was commonly thought that although the game was primarily just that, a game, it actually taught better command and strategy. It has been proved time and again that people who trend their gaming habits towards more strategy based games, Age of Empires for one, actually improve a lot of real life strategic problems quicker. This of course is open to debate as to whether this is simply that we enjoy things that we already have some proficiency at and thus those of us who do prefer RTS (Real Time Strategy) will in fact already have some inherent command of such skills.

Some pre game production fantasies

A key focus in the game scenery will be the advertising. As part of this there will be 3 major types.

• Corporate

• Federal

• Criminal

Corporate

The setting of the game is aboard a colossus farming ship. It's objective is simply to collect sea based resources (in particular the algae that grows all over the water) and deliver (via small cargo ships) the materials back to the mainlands for sale.

The advertising to this end will be based around the work that the ship carries out, the constant aggressive policing of the floating city and that lovely false corporate productivity banter.

• Billboards

• Posters

Federal

The floating farm has progressed beyond a simple corporate platform and become a floating city with citizens born, raised and dying upon it's decks. Due to the state of the mainlands, the famine, warfare and disease that have spread since the moon collapsed gaining placement on the ship sounds like a good deal. It's got work, food and is for the most part safe from the toils of war. However due to the demand for work the ship has become itself a battleground of illegal immigration and poor working conditions.

Policing has become paramount to the floating city state. The advertising on this front will represent

calls for new officers (or as I'm calling them in this game 'prefects'). Along with this there will also be warnings of punishment for criminal actions and rioting.

• Billboards

• Posters

• Fliers

Criminal

Criminal advertising will be in the form of graffiti mostly but also in the form of character speech. Passers by offering drugs etc. There will also be a strong terrorist and rebel advertising present. Posters and graffiti making up the majority of this.

• Posters

• Word of mouth

• Graffiti

Prosumer

Here is a word that I have only recently discovered. One that I doubt we’ll be seeing in the Oxford Dictionary anytime soon. Prosumers; this neologism is the head on collision of producer and consumer. The idea that the consumer and producers would merge in the production of, in this case at least, games. This can almost be seen in Half Life, but what I expect will grow into a much more definitive genre before long.

Half Life isn’t really recognized for Half Life as much as it’s recognized for the shear quantity and quality of the community mod work. Few of us brought Half Life 2, for example, for the core game but for the opportunity to play any one of the hundreds of mods it would spawn after its release. This is prosumerism, a professional industry standard product released and customized to fit by the consumer. Another example of this would be Second Life, a game that is so massive in it’s customization that it’s not so much a professional game anymore as it is our (that is to say, the general public’s) creation. Second Life is nothing without direct community customization. This is the direct result of the massive demand for new and interesting products to hit the market, and in my opinion, the world population feeling a certain lack of identity.

Free Game and Industry Connections

Today’s entertainment industries are some of the most lucrative in circulation and the impact and importance that the video game makes on the market is undeniably the largest portion of this.

For me however the most impressive aspect of the games industry doesn’t dwell on profit margins but in the ever growing free game and community ran games out there.

As never before we are seeing a massive increase in creative free exchange of information and ideas on such a structured level. Games such as half life with its extensive modders support are just an example that I’m sure most of us can relate to. Taking it further however is the increased rate at which games at industry standard are created entirely from scratch on a community collaborative effort are emerging. Games created via communities of enthusiasts with all manner of varying skill levels and experiences are pulling towards common artistic goals.

A fantastic example of this is the excellent “Total Annihilation: Spring” project. Based on the popular and now aging game “Total Annihilation” this project features a very clever Wiki style creation allowing any person to add material towards the game to be used openly by the developers. This project, not even nearing a level of completion, has already managed to inspire huge levels of modding and scripting to enhance the core game beyond its original intent.

However like most things there is of course an element of finance to couple great ideas, in the case of free games a lot of bulk of a game will be compiled through a few key members and projects like this do stem a lot of their success through not only the community submitted work but also from the donations. Furthermore to this there is the serious element of industry recruitment. A lot of the big name games companies now have at least one, if not many, game designers working for them that were directly recruited because of their free game and mod work. An example of this would be the Doom 3 key level designer who was recruited by the company from the maps he made for Doom 2 all those years ago. A simple boy creating simple yet interesting maps for one of his favourite computer games he now resides within the pay roll of one of the worlds leading games studios.