Players don’t need a credit card to earn credits for purchasing premium items
Sometrics will provide the player communities of Nexon America and PopCap with opportunities to earn free in-game currency through participation in offers powered by the company’s proprietary Offer Solution
By participating in a variety of consumer surveys, high-value subscriptions, e-commerce shopping and more, players earn virtual cash while advertisers achieve a prolonged attention from a target demographic
Sometrics is the first offer company to work with PopCap MC ADD: on Facebook (or social space) and has created a custom integration for players of the social game Bejeweled Blitz using offers from Microsoft, Netflix and Disney. PopCap’s games also include the best-sellers Bejeweled, Bookworm, Zuma, and Plants vs. Zombies, which collectively boast more than 1.5 billion downloads worldwide.
This will be useful in the exam as an example of synergy as we see the benefits of the two different companies coming together
Discuss the ways in which the extract constructs representation of gender using the following:
Camera shots, angles, movement & composition
Editing
Sound
Mise en scene
The beginning of the sequence shows a mid shot of a caged Doctor, which along with the ambient music gives off a loss of hope in the narrative and it also emphasises the powerlessness of our main protagonist. The small and caged doctor goes against the conventions of the majority of Doctor Who episodes where he is always the dominant male; this shot would have been used to bring fear to the audiences as the positions are reversed as the male antagonist is very much in control at the beginning of the narrative. The male antagonist is shown to have dominance through the part of the narrative as he makes the female protagonist kneel down to him. The long shot of the protagonist Martha kneeling to ‘the master’ with her family highlights how powerless she is and that there is nothing she can do to help them and vice versa. The submissive worker costumes that her family wear are a contrast to her military like costume creating a hierarchy between the family themselves showing their journeys had been different.
The setting of the studio creates a hierarchy through the decks which is highlighted in the birds eye shot where we see all the characters in the room. This gives the antagonist the conventional male dominance but it also highlights the woman in the red dress on the top deck. Although in the sequence she doesn’t speak it is subtly represented that she may have power even over the male antagonist as she is the only character wearing colour, also red suggests danger which insinuating she is a secret threat. The shot is also framed so that the audience could be in the room also, this increases the intensity of the narrative as there isn’t a clue to what will happen next increasing the hopelessness of the situation.
The male antagonist is made to be the most powerful because of the low angles places against him making him appear more powerful this is highlighted especially in the editing with the match cut which changes from the male antagonist and the female protagonist especially since it’s a high angle shot of her showing her weakness compared to him. The dialogue in the first part of the sequence is mainly by the antagonist showing his power and how submissive everyone else in the room are compared to him. The cutaway shot to show his digitalised army shows his power and his plan, the shot then showing the timer signifies the importance of time in the narrative. The high technology setting and the use of artificial lighting reflects how the antagonist is in control of everything. This is juxtaposed to the light that the Doctor generates when he becomes young again, the antagonist was angry because he wasn’t able to control the situation. The folly in the countdown is the point where the power shifts as the female protagonist begins to have more dialogue which goes against the high angle close-up shot as she is meant to be weak and the emotions shown are meant to be one of fear rather than one of confidence. The antagonist interjecting when the protagonist speaks is his way of trying to get the power balance back.
Storyline:
A young girl is driving down an old country lane late at night. She is tired. Her eyes open and close slowly as she tries to refrain from falling asleep. Suddenly, the radio she was listening to goes static. She tries to change the station, fumbling with the radio on the dashboard. She looks down, trying to find a station that will work. As she glances back up at the road, her headlights show a pram in the middle of the road. She screams, slamming down on the brakes and halting to a stop. A deep breath in. She opens the door and climbs out of her car, slowly making her way over to the pram. It’s cold. Dark. Noises echoing all around her. The pram is old but what is it doing in the middle of the road? She walks over to it. There is something under a blanket. Her hand reaches slowly and unsteadily towards it. She touches the edge of the blanket and rips it backwards. She screams again. An old doll with eyes and limbs missing was staring back at her. As she stands there catching her breath, she fails to notice her car door opening slowly in the background, and the shadow of a man climb in to her backseat. She backs up slowly from the doll, laughing at herself for being so jumpy. She gets back into the car and locks the door, switching on the engine and drives away. She checks the back mirror and sees the pram that caused her so much terror fading away into the distance. But a flash of movement catches her eye, and as the realisation floods through her body, she looks into the eyes of the man in her rear-view mirror, letting out one final scream.
Setting:
The setting For out thriller idea was inititally down an old country lane, in the middle of the night. This would be the perfect location, if we were able to have artificial lighting to enable the night time filming! However, as we don’t, we have decided to film during the day time, and then during the editing process, change the brightness, contrast and lighting in order to make it seem as though we filmed it during the night.
The setting is still down an old country lane and we will be traveling to East Tilbury to film.
Title:
We still have yet to come up with a title!
Roles:
Actors-
1) Anne-Marie will be playing the Protagonist driving the car who finds the doll.
2) Barney will be playing the man getting into her car, though he is not really seen properly.
Camera Work-
We will be having two cameras filming at once, one camera doing the filming for our actual thriller opening, and another camera doing a ‘behind the scenes’ video of our shooting experience. Because of this, we are all going to be doing some filming.
Editing-Again, all of us want to be involved with the editing in some way. Rachel and I will be doing the editing of the scenes, whilst Joel and Joe will be doing the sound editing. Barney will be helping with both.
Soundtrack-Barney has been creating a soundtrack that we will be able to use, and will be helping to put it into our video in the editing process.
In order to have an idea of what type of soundtrack I should have for our thriller sequence opening I looked back on our preliminary research. In our preliminary research we researched the top 100 thrillers as voted by thousands of IMDB users, I decided to look at the soundtracks of the top ten thrillers as voted by the public to see how they used them. The thrillers were:
1. The Godfather
2. The Godfather 2
3. Pulp Fiction
4. The Dark Knight
5. Rear Window
6. El Secreto de Sus Ojos
7. Fight Club
8. Psycho
9. The Usual Suspects
10. The Silence of the Lambs
All the soundtracks that I listened to mirrored the the state of mind of the antagonist/protagonist. ‘Psyhco’ which is most revlevant to our thriller mirrored the use of violins and high paced and high pitched music mirrored the mind of the antagonist as it reflected that he is dangerous and unpredictable and because there are so many different sounds shows the different aspects the antagonist has to him which makes him more sinister. The soundtrack for ‘Pulp Fiction’ makes us immediatly identify that it is an action thriller. From researching all these soundtracks I know that our soundtrack has to make it recognizable that our thriller is a psychological one.
The main changes we made, as stated in my Rough Cut blog entry, were adding more sound effects, increasing the level of sound continuity and making the titles more appropriate.
The one difficulty we came across was when we used Adobe After Effects to create a day to night conversion allowing the scene to look as if it was shot at night. We had trouble rendering it as the computers we used were not able to handle the memory needed to do it. We therefore decided to scrap that idea and produce it regardless.
I think our final cut of our thriller opening sequence has been highly successful and was a fun task to complete.
We got 28/60 for our rough cut of our thriller so we had a lot of changes to make to increase our mark.
Our rough cut:
In our feedback we were told that we scored highly in our visual continuity and that our shots and the development of them were good; but were also told that it was mainly the sound continuity that was losing us marks and in order to get a better grade we would have to improve on this. In the first 6 seconds we used diegetic sound but in order to get better marks we were told to get rid of it and instead our whole narrative should only consist of non-diegetic noise as using sound effects would gain us more marks. We needed sound effects in various parts of the narrative such as when the protagonist was walking and when she was in the car. We knew that some of the sound effects would be difficult to find but we used all the sound effects that related to our thriller in our final cut. We were also told to either get rid of the heart beats or to make them lower as they didn’t match much with the narrative.
Another criticism was our titles as they didn’t mirror anything related to our narrative. We were also told that our thriller was too short and we needed to make it at least 25 seconds longer; we were told that we could make it longer by establishing the non-diegetic music with the narrative which we had failed to do. Overall we didn’t have much to change and thankfully we didn’t have to re-shoot any aspects of our narrative as this would have made the continuity not as good.
Once we had chosen our final groups for our thriller videos, we had a priliminary film and sound project to complete.
This involved looking at the soundtrack of Tony’s theme, from the movie Scarface, and seeing how it is effectively used, then using the theme in our own short clip.
We had three rules which were:
1) We have to use Tony’s Theme
2) We must convey atmosphere from the use of the Song
3) We must have an area of silence with effective use.
The first thing we did was watch a clip where tony’s theme was used, and then discuss as a class how effective we thought it was and what kind of atmosphere we felt it gave off.
We then went back to our groups to decide how we could incorporate the theme into our own idea’s, drawing up a rought storyboard of our ideas.
My groups idea was to have one boy, Joel, walking down an allyway, when two other boys, Barney and Joe, try to attack him. We chose the parts based ont he fact that Joel is significantly smaller than Joe and Barney (No offence!) As we thought the audience would assume him toget beaten up. However, Joel suprises us all by stopping the attack and dodging the blows. It is then a blackout, leaving the audience in suspence. Did he beat them up?
We chose to film ours down an allyway near school. It had a bridge over it, which i think worked well for the lighting, because it meant at certain points, when the light was behind the characters, it was mainly a sillouhette, with only certain detail being able to be seen. I think this gave a really good effect, as it gave a sense of enigma. Debra and I did the filming, and we learnt to make sure we press the right button at the right time, there were times when i was filming, then pressed pause when the action started!
Joel then took away the footage, and edited it, and i think he did a really good job with it. He edited the timing of it to give the video a staggered effect and put in the theme and silences to create effect, all parts of our three rules!
I feel that this was a very eye opening experience to working in such a large group (there are five of us) as we had a lot of difficulty keeping our time organised and ended up missing the deadline. It has showed us that we need to plan out everything we’re doing, and keep to a proper schedual in order to get everything finished on time. We also need to make sure not just one person has the things we need, incase of abscences. There were few occasions that someone had the footage on tape we needed to edit, but due to illness, we couldn’t get anything done.
We need to make sure we compromise as a group, and come up with decisions together, being prepared to give in when our individual ideas are not liked as a majority, instead of arguing all the time. I think this preliminary task has helped us to see what changed we need to make when we do our actual project, in all aspects like the preparation, the filming and the editing processes.
Euphoria is a game animation engine created by Naturalmotion based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis, NaturalMotion’s proprietary technology for animating 3D characters on-the-fly “based on a full simulation of the 3D character, including body, muscles and motor nervous system”. Instead of using predefined animations, the characters’ actions and reactions are synthesized in real-time; they are different every time, even when replaying the same scene. While it is common for current video games to use limp “ragdolls” for animations generated on the fly, Euphoria employs a more complex method to animate the entirety of physically-bound objects within the game environment. [3] According to its web site, Euphoria runs on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC[1] hardware platforms and is compatible with all commercial physics engine
A press release that was enclosed with the second trailer eventually confirmed that Grand theft auto is the first of Rockstar’s games to feature Euphoria
Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE), is a game engine created by a small team called the “RAGE Technology Group” at the video game developer Rockstar SanDiego with contributions by Rockstar North Rockstar developed the engine to facilitate game development on the PC, PlayStation 3, Wii, and xbox360 consoles. RAGE evolved from the Angel Game Engine developed by Rockstar San Diego for use in the sixth generation console era versions of the Midnight Club series and other Rockstar San Diego games.[1]
Rockstar has integrated a few third party middleware components into RAGE like the proprietary Euphoria[2] character animation engine and the open source Bullet[3] physics engine.
Prior to RAGE, Rockstar mostly used Criterion games ‘ RenderWare engine to develop various game titles, including the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC installments of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.[4] The PSP versions and later ports of the Grand Theft Auto ‘Stories’ games however were built on RAGE.[5] Development of RAGE was a reaction to the acquisition of Criterion by video game conglomerate Electronic Arts. Rockstar chose not to license the RenderWare engine due to concern over the information gathering clause in EA’s license agreement
It took so long to make because they were making it more sophisticated than the previous GTA games. To make the game more realistic the makers of GTA IV used the game engine RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) and Euphoria a game animation engine. They used Euphoria control the way the players move which made the characters realistic. This is a change from the use of pre-written animation. The use of Euphoria means that each character interaction will be different for each player. The production of GTA IV took 31/2 years because of this change in technology which made the visual affects of the game better.
When doing any filming on location, we need to do a risk assessment to make sure that all concievable problems have been thought about to prevent anything from going wrong.
Here are the scanned in copies of our storyboards, and also a powerpoint presentation explaining the shots used.
The scanned in copies are the main scenes, whereas in the powerpoint presentaion there are a few shots added in, just to give the thriller a better overall effect! The link to the powerpoint is marked as storyboard under the scanned pictures of the storyboard.
