Documentary: Final Video

Here is the finished group edit of our documentary on Dungeons and Dragons:

Director's Notes

Cold Open/ Phase 0

The video begins in medias res as I wanted to instantly establish a tone and atmosphere that launches a fundamental question of the documentary 'what is D&D?' . This section is a portion of Phase 2 and sets up an amateurish college style with moving shaky cam and looks into camera. A viewer can instantly see this as a participatory documentary as I, the director, am the introductory protagonist through this journey. The cold is capped off by a run of existing D&D Youtube introduction videos to explain to the audience this answer to the opening question. This allowed us to catch the audience up to speed so we could more freely focus on the community the game creates rather than spending too much time discussing the game's mechanisms. This montage ends with mention of and a brief introduction to the Dungeon Master, directly setting up Phase 1 and the position the protagonist will likely take as fore shadowing. This introduction is abruptly ended and we move to Jacob having just set up the camera. By this point you can definitely realize the director and cameraman will be very important and vocal in the telling of this story and topic. By having me watch a D&D video on my laptop when Jacob walks in, we can establish that the montage may have been a series of videos Nick had been watching in the lead up to Jacobs arrival with the camera. To make the progression into Phase 1 feel more natural, I vamped up a classical tavern like background track under the scene to stuck the visuals together.

Phase 1

Following the introduction in Phase 0, our title card appears, with a background image drawn by Vi. This title card perfectly, in my opinion, captures the timelessness of the game and grounds the whole documentary in a traditional tone. The colour palette throughout the documentary was then suited to match the tones on the card. Following the title card, we jump in the meet of the action with Max who talks Nick, now the camera man, through basic D&D and DMing. Nick behind the camera was intentional here as we wanted Jacob, as Nick’s best mate, to film the majority of the documentary but as this is one of Nick’s friends Jacob was not needed and it would be too crowded behind camera. The interview used for Max was spliced together to cut Nick’s questions and I altered the brightness so that Max’s face wouldn’t be in shadow. This is our first interview in the video and we strictly follow the rule of thirds. My only major problem with the framing here was the background as it is too disorganized was extra unnecessary lights against the wall. At a point in this segment, we also see a name card appear on screen, placed in by Josh, along with several images to cover the transitions between shots in the interview. I wanted to implement Nick entering and leaving the house into this section to give the phase more coherence and wrap it as its own section. Max’s interview is fairly serious and supposedly adds that angle to the documentary going forward but we haven’t got to the main group yet. Josh’s insert shots of game titles and stock gifs to fill space were good with the only one standing out as I looked to different from the palette being the controller.

Phase 2

Phase 2 begins with a montage of Nick trying to find players. This was done as a montage to speed up the process and add a comical aspect which was also informed by the choice of music. I wanted to make sure that it was easy to identify the clip from the start of the documentary from coming from this montage. We then jumped members of our class, planting Cai in the crowd, to get a reaction to the mention of the game. I wanted to put across the outsiders perspective of D&D in this phase, which is shot in POV with Jacob behind it. This shot with the girls at the lockers feels a lot longer but I didn’t want to cut this down and disect it as the awkward silence and slow back away is important to their perception of the game. As the girls move away, Cai gives a look back to Nick and seems as if they are just going along with the popular girls. We then get the flip side of this when Vi comes running in, who you can see is already sat in the area listening when Nick approaches the girls. This is another drawn out scene as I wanted nick to feel a bit overwhelmed by this and someone’s true interest. From this, we cut to the classroom where its another day and Nick has been messaging Josh. With Josh’s character we wanted to portray, similar to Cai, someone who doesn’t feel comfortable discussing these topics with their normal friend group and instead wants to be more secret. In Josh’s case he just wants to try it to see if he and his group had judged it poorly whereas for Cai, there is a genuine interest but they don’t feel they can express that in the group that surrounds them. Nick and Jacob meet Cai in the corridor and have another drawn out POV scene but this time we are able to jump cut as the awkwardness is beginning to ware off due to their genuine interest in the game.

Phase 3

Phase 3 continues the more mockumentary style set up in Phase 2 as we present the initial meeting of the group. Originally, I had this down as being a longer scene where we could see the members of the group interact more but due to time constraints I moved things around and found the footage worked better as B-roll with the interviews of each person running underneath. These interviews were designed to be surface level as they are establishing these characters to the audience and their motivations for joining. I took a little longer to develop Vi’s interview as their character was all about playing the game before so they were already in the community. I ended up drawing audio from the phase 6 interview and sliding secondary shots on top to tell Vi’s original story with the game. The audio work between the two tracks is noticeable but you are more distracted by the visuals and information. In this section of interviews, Nick also talks directly to the interviewee which isn’t typical but I wanted to hammer in the idea of this being a documentary made by a student for sharing this experience and these people are confused by being infront of the camera. Josh was able to find so good images of their characters and we put name cards with each interview to explore these as people not just stereotypes. The name cards were originally different colours but I changed them all to be grey as it fit the consistancy of the title card. During the interviews, we have a more comedic moment with Jacob as he goes over a little history of the game. The music is designed to come from nowhere just like the information given. This was a comical way to include some basic history of the game and explore Jacob more as a character. At the end of this section, we finally get the start of an interview with Nick which delivers a short number of his feelings towards the new group an sets him up to return in this interview later on.

Phase 4

This phase was originally designed to be a short one with Nick and Jacob talking about story options for the game before Nick cuts Jacob off as he’s not supposed to know the story as he is a player. This continued to work with the home-made mockumentary aspect but didn’t further the narrative of explore the topic in any interesting ways. Instead, I decided this would be a fitting place to put the majority of Nick’s interview. In this final version, Nick introduces the plan to Jacob and the camera before we switch gears to follow his motivations for playing the game. The insert shots of him playing D&D in the past and stills from the old school add to Nick’s character and we are able to learn more about the why behind this project. This wasn’t the greatest interview as Nick spends most of his time looking down so I tried to find more insert shots to cover this up. As well as this, he has quite a slow and stopping speech pattern so I cut down some unnecessary dialogue to get to the point. This section finishes with B-roll footage of the game beginning before transitioning to the phase 5 titles. I included this B-roll here as originally I thought we would have a section of watching some of the game but this drew the documentary to a halt and had no valuable conchanges in dialogue so using this with interview noise was the best fit.

Phase 5

I wanted to make sure the audience was aware the session had taken place between phases 4 and 5 so placed in a card reading ‘a few hours later to emphasize this. My focus here was the thoughts of the players and how they found the experience rather than taking a look into how gameplay operates. This portion of interviews sticks with a mockumentary adjacent style, as Nick talks directly to them again, but there is a more serious underlay as the players have finally experienced the game and got to know each other. I zoomed in the videos to remove empty space and feel closer to the party now they had come together. Unfortunately, we didn’t test the camera height to the tallest person so although the camera position remains constant and transitions between interviews are seemly, Jacob’s head is cut off the top. This is something we need to take more care with in future. There was also a slight knock in the camera during Cai’s interview which was minor. With these interviews, to make them feel more connected, I made sure they were L and J cuts so progression through the phase felt fluid. In phase 5, the music I chose from my existing collection of D&D music was a more somber piece as I wanted to emphasize the truth of these scenes rather than a comical vibe.

Phase 6

As the conclusion of the video, phase 6 continued directly on from phase 5 by using the same audio track. This worked to emphasize the connection and community the group now have whereas in their opening interviews the music cuts to a different track for each person to highlight their individualities. This was a tricky section to put together as we knew we wanted the audio from the day 5 footage but didn’t like the visuals as they tonally didn’t match. At the beginning of this segment, I took more B-roll footage from the session and switched them to black and white to suggest these as flashbacks. When each of the party members begin talking, I dropped in them walking through the door for the session, metaphorically expressing them stepping into this new community. We knew to present a true community we need more footage than just us so we went searching online for different streams of D&D and I created a montage of these, cutting between other D&D players having fun with the game whilst the audio captured individual experiences within the community. Josh, in his interview, mentions Stranger Things and other fantasy media relating to D&D so it was only fitting that they appear on screen when he mentioned them. At some point the credits, made by Jacob, needed to role so it only felt organic to cut these streamers of a transition into the credits, still playing the audio from experiences underneath. When these came to a halt and the credits finished up, we wanted to include a little end credit scene to tie the documentary together. As we didn’t use the full clips from the session we had plenty of material remaining and their was one moment during the session, which was actually ran, we felt we had to include as it truly presented an aspect of D&D being the conradary. The only fitting location for this clip was at the end, cutting the cheers from the group perfectly before showing the title card one last time to cap it all off.

In this section, as the director and assistant editor, I have a written explanation of why aspects of the video ended up how they did.

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