Unit 27: Factual Programme ProductionJim Doherty

Ethan McLaughlin

Outcome 3: Be able to plan and research a factual programme for television Genre My factual programme will be a special interest documentary, it is special interest because it deals with video games, and it’s a documentary because I will discuss event that actually took place.

Develop ideas Programme concept: This factual programme will be a short documentary about the video game crash of 1983.

target audience: I think the target audience for my video would be people who are interested in the history of the video game industry or history in general, I also think people who have any interest in video games will be interested in my piece because it talks about very important events in the industry. I believe the age range for my piece would be 15 to 50 years old. This piece will probably be more interesting to gamers who are around forty years old because they would have been alive when these events were happening.

Research : Primary sources: I didn’t come across many primary sources; the closet thing I found to these types of sources would be several images of newspapers that I found onlineSecondary sources: My secondary sources while researching this video would be various videos and articles online about the topic, for example:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv7DJrLAZus&ab_channel=GamingHistorianhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4F_sZiAl7s&ab_channel=CrashCoursehttp://www.bugsplat.com/great-video-game-crash-1983/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983?from=Main.TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983http://uk.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-great-video-game-crash-of-83

Planning : Production organisation: once I had decided on what I wanted my factual programme to be about I began by writing my script, after I completed that I began various other pre-production pieces including a shot list, storyboards and a location list Roles and responsibilities: I everything for this video, I wrote it, filmed and edited it by myself

Budget:

Equipment Time Cost

Camera 2 hours £50

Tripod 2 Hours £20

Microphone 2 Hours £20

Editing computer

8 Hours £50

Audio Recorder 2 Hours £20

Documentation: All my pre-production documentation can be found below:

Pre-production:Script:(Text in red represents scripted pieces to camera)

My name is Ethan McLaughlin and today I’m going to talk to you about the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. For those who don’t know the Video Game crash also known as Atari Shock was a huge recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985. There were lots factors that went into causing this crash and I will discuss most of them in the following video.

Reason number one: Bad games.

Pac-Man is one of the most well-known and successful games ever and after the original arcade game was released in 1980 Atari acquired the rights to produce a version on their home console, the Atari 2600, at this time there were approximately 10 million 2600’s were regularly being used, with this knowledge Atari decided to produce 12 million copies of Pac-Man expecting that 2 million people would buy an Atari just to play the game. A man called Tod Frye was tasked with creating the game; development began in May of 1981. After a few months Frye had created a prototype for the game and he showed it to Atari, however, Atari wanting to capitalize on the lucrative holiday season released the prototype. Once it was released it garnered mixed to negative reviews, however the game initially sold well, selling around 7 million copies but these sales eventually slowed down and Atari had to deal with the profit loss that came with over 5 million unsold copies. Another example of a game that did poorly was “E.T. the extra-terrestrial”. Atari acquired the rights to produce an adaption for the 2600, which getting the rights cost 20 million dollars alone. Similar to Pac Man Atari wanted the game to be ready for the Christmas period but development only begin in late July this meant that the developer had less than six weeks to create the game. Around 5 million copies of the game where produced and the game released in December 1982. Of those 5 million copies, 3.5 million came back returned or unsold.

Total: 160

Reason number Two: Loss of publishing control. In 1979 several programmers left Atari and created Activision, which became the first third party developer, many other companies followed suit and soon lots of developers and publisher’s independent form Atari and other companies were putting their games on shop shelves. With the less of publishing control Atari and other video game companies could not have good quality control for the games that would be on their consoles, this caused poorly made, derivative games to flood the market. Reason number three: Flooded Console market.Over the last several console generations there have been only three competitors in the home console market, a console from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for example this generation; there is the Xbox One, PS4 and the Wii U. However during the 80’s there was lots of consoles on the market like the Atari 2600, the 5200, ColecoVision, Odyssey 2, Intellevision, Vectrex, tandyvision, tele-games system, Fairchild channel F system 2 to name a few. Each one of these consoles had there now library of games, many of which from third party developers. This meant that consumers had a lot of choice but not enough information and a lot of people ended up not buying any consoles at all.

Reason number four: Competition from PC’sComputers had better visuals and sound compared to home consoles, this combined with the ability to do things like accounting and word processing and a their reasonable price made home computers a better investment than a console therefore consoles were beginning to less and less. These contributing factors all lead to 97 percent drop in revenue for the video game industry, from 3.2 billion dollars in 1983 to approximately 100 million dollars in 1985Conclusion: The rise of NintendoNow some of you are probably wondering how the western game market recovered? And the answer is Nintendo. After the NES or the Nintendo Entertainment System was released the industry began to recover and by 1988, revenues were over 2.3 billion dollars. One of the biggest reasons for Nintendo’s success was their stance on the third party games, in 1986 Nintendo’s then president, Hiroshi Yamauchi stated, “Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games” because of this, Nintendo limited the number of games that third party developers could release and also put its “Seal of Quality” on products that met their standards. Another reason for Nintendo’s success was their stellar first party line up with games like “Super Mario Bros.” and “The Legend of Zelda” becoming instant classics and being regarded as some of the best games ever made.I hope you have enjoyed my brief history of the video game crash of 1983. Thank you for watching.

Location Props Equipment CostumesNWRC studios N/A Camera

LightingN/A

BT48 7AL MicrophoneGreen screenAutocue

Location List:

Shotlist:My factual programme will be me talking directly to camera with cutaways throughout.Shot 1: Mid shot of myself talking directly to camera Cutaway 2: Arcade Pacman gameplayCutaway 3: Atari 2600 salesCutaway 4: Photo of Tod FryeCutaway 5: E.T Atari 2600 gameplayCutaway 6: Activision Cutaway 7: Modern consoles, Xbox One, Ps4, WII UCutaway 8: Various 80’s consoles including Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellevision etc.Cutaway 9: Shop Shelves full of gamesCutaway 10: 80’s Pc and Pc gamesCutaway 11: Nintendo Entertainment SystemCutaway 12: Hiroshi Yamauchi with quoteCutaway 13: NES games with seal of quality Cutaway 14: Super Mario Bros. gameplayCutaway 15: The Legend of Zelda gameplay

Outcome 4: Be able to produce a factual programme for television:

Production techniques : Scripted pieces to camera; my video has moments where I was talking directly to camera.Studio; these scripted pieces to camera were recorded in the radio room at the NWRC, I sat in front of a camera and read some parts of the videos script.Sound: I used the microphone on the camera to record the audio for my video and I also used a Marantz PMD661 to record back up audio just in case their was any problems with the cameras audio.

Production management : Monitoring progress; Identifying and solving problems; Production organisation: I booked the equipment I needed for my video (camera, tripod, audio recorder) on the day I was going to film. I had also made sure that the radio room wasn’t being used so I could film for as long as I needed.

Editing : Creating narrative; Creative narrative was very simple for this video, I simply had to show video or images that were relevant to what I saying. Illustrating topic: Illustrating the topic was quite easy for this factual programme, as I said before, I simply had to show footage that was relevant to the things I was saying, for example, in one part of the video I listed several consoles from the 1980s, and the footage that was shown were images or video of the consoles that I found online. There were also several moments were I talked about specific games and I show gameplay footage during those segments.