Digital News Production: Starting out

Our Group

Our group is made up of  Megan, Harry, Wesley and myself. We have previously worked together before in other projects as crew and advising on our separate projects, so found it right that we would work well together within the Digital News Production especially as we can work toward our single project. We all work very hard and trust one another to work hard and pull our equal weight within the project, which means we will work very well together.

Starting Out

While we were being briefed for our project and determining groups, my thoughts returned to the previous project where accessibility was not always possible and our topic became very complex so I really wanted to make sure we had a good solid topic in which we knew a lot about and couple realistically get access too.

As a group we wanted to focus on something rather light-hearted and quirky rather than something a little more fact heavy or serious. Megan, Harry and I are rather avid gamers and we quickly suggested a gaming news channel in which, each episode, we provide a short thought-provoking look within the gaming world on a variety of different ways. Each of us threw in ideas of news stories and topics we could look at. It didn't take long before we decided that he Gaming News Channel was perfect.

The Story

Our week's episode needed a topic, something we could focus in on that would be a hot button issue that is not only current but affects gamers enough to be worth reporting on. Initial ideas began with issues with video game violence, but we felt that this was an issue people other than gamers had which went against our target audience of primarily gamers.

We eventually came up with the topic which is: "Are Video Games being released Broken?"

We can up with the idea during an 'off track' discussion on how frustrated we were with certain games being released that were very buggy and how it took the fun out of the game or even sometimes didn't work. How now games are being released buggy and broken when we never remember it happening before? To which we as a group decided, why not have this be our topic? There is plenty of evidence, audiences to talk too and experts that can give us insight into why they are released in that condition.

Our strongest idea was yet to come as we thought our OB could be a reporter at the location of a midnight launch for a new game. So we quickly researched games coming out within the next month or so and found Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. This was perfect as the predecessor in the Assassin's Creed franchise was full of flaws and bugs on release date and received a lot of negative press form media, critics and their own fans.

We realized from this that our Package could be very good with such a strong topic and decided that for our package we could include an...

- Interview with expert explaining the pov of developers/opinion

- Use of a green screen for our studio piece

- Footage from games experiencing 'glitches' and 'bugs'

What to do now?

- Researching Gaming YouTube Channels

- Researching locations for midnight launches and following leads

- Finding an Expert on Gaming/Gaming development

- Creating a Website and YouTube Channel

- Creating a 'Brand'