Making my Video- Costs and Caps

An issue arose during recording my footage from Call of Duty. There is a cap/limit to how many films you can have saved for uploading to the internet- 8 films. This limited how many edited clips I could have. What's worse is that all footage must be under 2 minutes long, meaning I couldn't merge some of the footage I had done into less videos. This presented me with two options to solve this issue:

1. I could upload clips of less than two minutes for editing, and then delete them afterwards. The issue with this being I would be losing the original footage permanently, meaning if there was an error with YouTube after I deleted my footage, it would become problematic getting that footage or anything similar again; costing time.
2. There is an option to purchase an upgraded file limit from the Call of Duty store, costing £1.45, allowing for storage of 40 clips over the previous 8 clips. This would mean I could store everything from the test shots and the actual footage I will be using.

In the end, I decided to fork out for the upgraded capacity so I could store everything. It will give me more freedom when getting said footage from the game, allowing me to experiment more and save it.



*Other Costs*
Other costs that arose during pre-production included the cost of the face paint and blood. This amounted to about £7

Concept 3 : How I would obtain gameplay footage

In a previous post wherein I detailed some of my ideas for the video, I mentioned that a segment of the music video (guitar instrumental) could have a montage of Call of Duty Zombies footage. This would mean using a service on the game to capture footage, however I didn't know how to transfer that footage from game to YouTube. So how would I do that?

Well actually it is quite simple:

1.Go to the theater mode. This is accessible in both multiplayer (shown to the right) and zombies.
[For the purposes of my video I will be accessing it in zombies.] 










2. Go to Select film. This should bring up a list of recorded footage from any games played (shown below). Select the footage you want to playback.

3. Find the part in the footage you wish to record and upload. Pause it at the start point, and hit X to start recording, then stop it when you wish. Pressing Y will put you into free cam. Any movement you make in free cam will be recorded- you are the camera. There are other tools you can use such as dolly cam to predetermine movement etc.

After recording what you wish, you can then name and save the clip. As shown to the side.







4. Press the start button on your controller to bring up the menu shown to the left and select upload edited film.

5.After uploading the edited films. Exit back to the menus and return to select film menu. This time, instead of scrolling to the recent games tab, go to the edited films tab. This should now contain what you have just recorded. Select the video you with to post to YouTube

6. After selecting the desired clip, return to the menu and select render video. Then select save, adding it to a page on Call of Duty Elite.

You will then have to wait for the video to render. Depending on how long the video is, this could take a while. Once this is successful, you should see the notice shown to the side. Following this link on internet explorer will take you to where the video has been uploaded to.




From here, there should be an option to upload footage to YouTube after signing in with the account connected to my Xbox Live account, and to obtain that for editing I would have to find a website which would allow me to download videos.

So, that is how I will obtain gameplay for a montage sequence in my music video. Despite the controversial nature of obtaining my gameplay, it is the only way of obtaining it without expensive capture card equipment. 

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nck5QYzrH6M   All screen shots and instructions are adapted from this video source. 

Audience Research Focus Group

The focus group only being small, didn't give me a detailed idea of audience opinions and attitudes towards my concepts. Also, the environment was relaxed so the discussions tended to be informal and really chatty. However, I was able to learn about what an audience expects based on a variety of things.

I asked a variety of questions in order to get a better understanding of a general audience. I asked about how they use technology to access music videos, which helped me to see how people may access my own.

I posed open questions in order to allow the people I questioned to tell me exactly what they thought, rather than giving options between answers which would have restricted what I could have been told. One of the open questions I used asked the group about my song specifically and allowed me to get feedback on the lyrics.