Evaluation

Here I will be Evaluating what I've done through out the project and what I personally think about what I accomplished.

Evaluation Start : The start of this project was like any other project, being introduced to the project and learn the fundamentals of it before starting the actually creating anything. This was very helpful as it allowed us to understand and realise how a documentary can be made as well as the many type of approaches we can go with it, more specifically what kind of genre of documentary to go with, examples ranging from a parody-like style better known as a Mockumentary or going with a more Observational approach, to the film maker being part of the film as being a participator.

With like previous projects, we are given a few documentaries from the tutor to watch and review them as part of our learning, we are also given a third one of our own choice to watch and review with it either being something that we enjoy or related to what our individual projects are. This is helpful as it gives us a feel for how we should approach with our own documentaries before creating them.

We're also given some practical work that can be beneficial to use that can be possibly used within our FMP's, Giving us a wider variety of editing techniques to use within the video, with one example being animating the text for the title card of the video.

For our Pre-Production we were tasked with creating a MindMap that we would put our two initial ideas for a documentary and what it would be talking about. After finishing the MindMap we had to choose one of the two ideas that we would be using for the documentary with the other one being left as a potential backup idea if needed. This was useful if our first idea fell through and didn't get approved at the pitch presentation, allowing us to try again without having to worry with making a new idea.

I filled out a Documentary treatment, explaining within it what type of documentary I will be doing as well as how I will achieve this by explaining the concept, planning and what I have access too in order to achieve this. This treatment can be used as useful evidence for the project marker as it shows them what my intentions are for this documentary and showing them how I planned to get this project started.

I created a small mood board which just had some images from MGSV to give a very basic idea what I'll be talking about in the documentary. I mostly used this as a little reminder for what I want to focus on within the documentary.

I did some pre-planning for my bibliography by creating a word document and citing a bunch of music from within MGSV's soundtrack, for the purpose of using within the documentary, all of music that's used within this documentary is music from the game itself that I personally chose after listening through the whole soundtrack, as to choose which song that would fit best in the documentary.

From here on I made my Pitch presentation for Metal Gear Solid V (MGSV) and presented it to my tutor. After a few minutes of discussing about my idea choice, my idea was approved and I could move onto creating and filming my Documentary video.

After my idea was approved, I started working on a production schedule to keep track of what I need doing, after doing this I created a script and a set of questions that I would be asking my interviewee, the interviewee in question is a friend that I contacted beforehand and requested if I could interview him, he agreed and in the raw interview footage at the very start he stated that he consented to being filmed for the documentary.

The interviewee is an old friend of mine and is studying at university for game development/game design and is also a big fan of MGSV, he was a perfect candidate for my FMP Documentary, so once we were able to schedule a proper time to do the interview, I called him on Discord and started preparing the interview, the interview went on for about over an hour and luckily the way he constructed his answers ended up answering multiple questions at once which made it easier for me to be honest.

Once the interview was done it was time to record some footage to accompany it. I first recorded some gameplay of MGSV as filming footage for that game was rather easy compared to the other games that required me to emulate them by using a ps3 emulator to run them. once I had about at least 10 mins to an hours worth of footage from both Metal Gear, MGS1, MGS2 and MGSV, I proceeded to start the initial edit of my documentary.

I opened up both Adobe Premier Pro and Adobe Audition, premier for the video editing and audition for the voice over and voice effects if needed (voice effects ended up being done via a premier edit option) and began editing together my FMP video.

The process of editing was tedious but rewarding. It took about two and a half days total to edit together the FMP video, whilst editing together that video, My friend that I had interviewed was also well taught in video editing and was helpful enough to give me feedback, suggestions and tips to help me improve the video. This was very helpful as it made sure that what I was producing something that was to the absolute best I can do if possibly better than any video I've made before for college.

I did some standard editing like opacity fades and text, but I also mixed the music with the interview whilst making it not too loud but still masking any low static within the interview video, as well as the music seamlessly fading in and out and also changing without disturbing the viewer. There's also an instance of a blur effect and two censors using techniques that I learnt from my Thursday lessons. I also decided on a whim to use an edit on my closing voice over by using an editing technique to make my voice sound like it was coming from a cassette player, which I thought was a small but brilliant addition to the video. I also ripped some audio straight from the game but only the audio of "say the magic words boss" part of the video as that was the only audio I needed straight from the audio files.

At around 5AM on Thursday the 26th of may, I had finally finished my edit of the MGSV documentary and once I exported it by turning it into a MP4 file, I also turned on the max render quality option to ensure that it would be the best quality it could be, I also made sure that I set it with a 2 VBR pass at 15 Mbps so the video would be of top encoding quality as well. I then uploaded it onto YouTube and immediately sent it to my tutor to view and give feedback on if I need to improve on anything.

I received feedback for my video by my tutor and I immediately went back to edit anything that I needed to change or improve, this being a few jump cuts, removal of my asking interviewee if they would introduce themselves and increasing the audio of my closing voice over.

Overall I really enjoyed making this FMP project and the topic that I covered for it as well as how my FMP came out. One thing I would improve on is my time management and maybe some pre-planning before going along with the project. But all and all, I think I have done the absolute best I can with this documentary and can't wait for people to see my work.