Both: Rough Cut Of Our Documentary, Version 1.0

Callum: Script - Final Draft

After having grossly overestimated the amount of script needed to fill five minutes, as well as battling some tone issues, various re-writes led us to our final shooting script.  You will find the complete shooting script below.

1: Women. They’re strange, difficult to understand creatures. They have feelings and thoughts, but said feelings and thoughts consist almost solely of “shoes” and “boys” and, occasionally, “sex”. They look pretty, taunt us with how pretty they are and spray stingy liquid in our eyes when we get too close. Their only purpose in life: to make sandwiches and babies. Outside of that, they’re nothing. Toys to be played with. Helpless creatures with no real thoughts of their own, right?

2: (reads this paragraph whilst being poked by a ruler) Wrong. Women are strong, women are powerful, women are, in many ways, superior to their male counterparts. And, if not superior, then equal in most every way. We are not weak, we are not emotional time-bombs, and we are certainly not useless toys that men can play with. Stop that.

This is something that movies and TV are working hard to fix. In the last decade, tens, dozens, maybe even near the hundreds of strong female characters have popped up. Characters who do more than just stand around being eye candy, getting kidnapped and talking about periods. Characters who, if you get engrossed enough, can feel like real human beings.

Videogames, however, are still stuck three decades in the past.

Title Sequence (34 seconds)

2: Pop quiz! Who is the first female character in a videogame? Time's up. If you answered Ms. Thunder Thighs here (picture of Chun Li), (comical buzzing sound) you are wrong. And if you answered Ms. Wakka Wakka (picture of Ms. Pac Man), (comical buzzing sound) you are also wrong. No, the first recorded instance of a female protagonist in a videogame, a playable female protagonist in a videogame, is Ladybug.

1: Ladybug is a long forgotten 1981 arcade game that managed to pre-date Ms. Pac Man by a couple of months but had a lot in common with Ms. Puck Face by being a maze game. Maze games back then being like FPS' today. Ms. Pac Man and Lady Bug were strong female characters, even if one of them is technically an insect rather than a recognisable lady, pixels back then not being what they are today. So, why are they strong?

Well, they both instigate the plot, they both do their own thing and they both don't have their entire lives revolve around or be ruined by men. They let nothing stand in their way, they aren't slaves to their emotions and, unless you look at some horrible, drudgery corner of the Internet, they don't get their kit off for no reason. They are both strong female characters.

2: And, in fact, it'd probably be very fair to say that they are the only truly strong female characters in videogames, alongside Chell, GlaDOS, Alyx Vance and, of course, Commander Shepard. But that still only means that I can count the number of truly strong female characters on 1 hand and an extra thumb. In addition, three of those are from Valve games, two are from games with little to no story and one is part of a character creation suite where the default option is a male. That's bad.

So, this begs the question of, “Why?” Why are women so poorly treated in videogames and yet you can turn around and see 900 examples of big burly men who are always in control of the situation and know what they are doing and are never the victims of a horribly misguided rape scene? Well, there are three main reasons. Poor story writing in general, cultural differences and a misaimed target market.

Interview Segment (40 Seconds)

Both: Problem Encountered and Resolved: The Interview

Our original plan for the interview was to contact somebody through the gaming industry for an interview about their views on women and sexism in gaming, as we felt they would have a better insight than others we asked. However, we recently discovered that due to a mixture of bad hardware, software and some appauling internet connection, the interview we recorded with our interviewee using Skype was not successful, as the final result was barely audible with only certain parts being understandable.

Here is the Skype call we recorded, as an example of how poor the quality was based on the sound coming from the call.

To respond to this issue, we will e-mail the questions to the intended interviewee, get a response from him, then script the answers and request an actor as a stand-in to publish the answers.

Both: Response to the Brief

In order to meet the brief, we will need to
1. Film the 5 minute extract of the documentary required for the set task
2. Construct a double page spread for a listings magazine
3. Construct a newspaper advertisement.

Both: Organisation Of Actors, Props, Locations, Etc.

Costumes
Casual (laidback looking for the Target Audience) but not messy (which just looks unprofessional).
Plain jeans (colour is not important, gives the impression of trying too hard to the TA and we're not making a fashion show, after all)
T-shirt, if it has logos then it must be relevant to the subject ("nerd" stuff; e.g. Rock Band logo).
Shoes, not formal (again, to fit the TA).

Props
Chair (for sitting on during the home segments)
Ruler/Stick/Pole (for pocking Amber with)
Relevant game (for tossing away later)
TV (to show game footage on, most likely in post-production)

Locations
SF4 & SF6 at Sir John Nelthorpe College (for "studio" segments)
Mat's house (interview segment)

Actors
Kyran Lowe - Male Host
Amber Rickell - Female Host
Mat Paget - Interviewee

Both: Final Ideas for Filming

So we are able to stick as close to the 5-minute extract restriction as possible. We will be filming the first nine paragraphs of the intended script. We decided this because we needed to identify a good cut-off point rather than leave the extract mid-point. Seeing as though our tenth paragraph was the start of a new section-topic in the documentary, we decided to end filming before then to reflect this.

All the paragraphs will be filmed, however, all but 3 paragraphs (paragraphs 1, 2 and 9) will be re-recorded in a booked recorded studio. This is because we intend to implement file footage also into the documentary, and the quality of the voice may not be strong enough to understand/hear. Recording the voice a second time will give us the option to compare them and identify which would be more suitable to use in the background.

Since our initial ideas, we decided we would be better off using various locations rather than the same two rooms throughout the documentary extract. We therefore decided to make use of only SF4 for the opening few paragraphs, then switching to a confined computer room for the discussion on maze games. The interview segment (after planning went askew from the originally intended plan) will use a pre-booked office in a quite corner of the school to avoid as much disturbance as possible. The remaining sections will more than likely to be filmed in outside rooms, again allowing minimal disruptions.

We will be using Skype as the method of getting the interview with Mat Paget. However, should the software fail to meet requirements/expectations in terms of quality, we will be asking our interviewee to send his response in a text format, so we can record them using a new actor, allowing the plans for other sections of the documentary to continue as scheduled.

For our props, we have decided to reject the idea of throwing a relevant game in the bin and using a television to demonstrate the actors playing games. In replacement of the removal of the TV's, we will be using computers to project gaming footage available through the Internet to provide extra strength to the points the actors are trying to put across to the target audience.

Both: Survey Example

Below are a collection of images that form our complete two-part survey.

Callum: Script - First Draft

This is the completed first draft of our script for the 5 minute extract.  This WILL be updated, edited and changed in parts.  It is NOT the final shooting script.

1: Women. They’re strange, difficult to understand creatures. They have feelings and thoughts, but said feelings and thoughts consist almost solely of “shoes” and “boys” and, occasionally, “sex”. They look pretty, taunt us with how pretty they are and spray stingy liquid in our eyes when we get too close. Their only purpose in life: to make sandwiches and babies. Outside of that, they’re nothing. Toys to be played with. Helpless creatures with no real thoughts of their own, right?

2: Wrong. Women are strong, women are powerful, women are, in many ways, superior to their male counterparts. And, if not superior, then equal in most every way. We are not weak, we are not emotional time-bombs, and we are certainly not useless toys that men can play with. Stop that.

This is something that movies and TV are working hard to fix. In the last decade, tens, dozens, maybe even near the hundreds of strong female characters have popped up. Characters who do more than just stand around being eye candy, getting kidnapped and talking about periods. Characters who, if you get engrossed enough, can feel like real human beings.

Videogames, however, are still stuck three decades in the past.

Title Sequence (9 seconds)

2: Pop quiz! Who is the first female character in a videogame? Time's up. If you answered Ms. Thunder Thighs here (picture of Chun Li), (comical buzzing sound) you are wrong. And if you answered Ms. Wakka Wakka (picture of Ms. Pac Man), (comical buzzing sound) you are also wrong. No, the first recorded instance of a female protagonist in a videogame, a playable female protagonist in a videogame, is Ladybug.

1: Ladybug is a long forgotten 1981 arcade game that managed to pre-date Ms. Pac Man by a couple of months but had a lot in common with Ms. Puck Face by being a maze game. Maze games back then being like FPS' today. Ms. Pac Man and Lady Bug were strong female characters, even if one of them is technically an insect rather than a recognisable lady, pixels back then not being what they are today. So, why are they strong?

Well, they both instigate the plot, they both do their own thing and they both don't have their entire lives revolve around or be ruined by men. They let nothing stand in their way, they aren't slaves to their emotions and, unless you look at some horrible, drudgery corner of the Internet, they don't get their kit off for no reason. They are both strong female characters.

2: And, in fact, it'd probably be very fair to say that they are the only truly strong female characters in videogames, alongside Chell, GlaDOS, Alyx Vance and, of course, Commander Shepard. But that still only means that I can count the number of truly strong female characters on 1 hand and an extra thumb. In addition, three of those are from Valve games, two are from games with little to no story and one is part of a character creation suite where the default option is a male. That's bad.

So, this begs the question of, “Why?” Why are women so poorly treated in videogames and yet you can turn around and see 900 examples of big burly men who are always in control of the situation and know what they are doing and are never the victims of a horribly misguided rape scene? Well, there are three main reasons. Poor story writing in general, cultural differences and a misaimed target market.

Interview Segment (40 Seconds)

1: Bad videogame writing usually stems from an over-reliance on stereotypes and cliches; the things that the industry grew up with, essentially. Damsels in distress, unflappable white heroes, minorities and foreigners either being helpers or just plain evil. Some games have moved past such outdated things, but most haven't and that's precisely why you can fit most every female character into one of three generic archetypes.

First, there's The Girl. There's pretty much nothing more to her personality, she's just The Girl. She's usually on the team purely to tick a box on the diversity checklist though sometimes she may get some semblance of a personality. Don't hold your breath, though, for any groundbreaking characterisation as it pretty much amounts to...

Model 1: Let's do the mission, guys.

1: Or...

Model 1: I totally want to have sexual relations with you, player character.

2: But the important thing is that the developer tried, right? That's pretty much the attitude of the developer too. And, since the character is pretty much just a blank slate, you can also expect them to be sexualised in some way, shape or form. Either their power armour has a lack of sleeves, they prefer tight fitting tank tops to actual armour or they star in a fantasy RPG; but you better believe that they will be sexualised the hell out of.

Cut-off Point.

There is more to the script, in case we get through all of this script long before the 5 minute mark.

Callum: Survey Analysis Results & Changes To Our Initial Ideas

So, after the failure of the first survey, we got re-posted it on another site and, one week later, we got some results that we could access and, more importantly, analyse.

Q1] How old are you?

We allowed our survey participants to enter their full age rather than select from a pre-determined set of groups as it made the participant feel like we wanted to hear their full opinions rather than leading them towards what we want them to choose.  The results gave us an overwhelming majority in the 15 to 23 group, with the most common answer being "18".  This means that we must tailor our programme to that age range, seeing as most of our audience is rather young.

Q2] What gender are you?

Here we locked the answers to "Male" or "Female" to ensure that no-one put down any stupid responses.  Again, we had an overwhelming response for one option, this one male.  At this stage, then, we'll want to make the show more appealing towards men, seeing as our potential audience is pretty much 4/5 men.

Q3] Have you ever watched a documentary (if no, please skip to Q10)?

A 100% yes response here, useful for the fact that it doesn't narrow down our potential target audience at all.

Q4] What genre of documentary do you typically watch?

We left this as an open question as we believed that it would allow users to specify exactly what they watch and that, as a result, we would not inadvertently exclude any of their genres.  Plus, if we were to use technical terms like "participatory" then we may have confused the responder by utilising terms that they may not have understood.

Anyways, the most frequent response was Nature documentary with the next most frequent being Historical documentary.  Nature documentaries often use lots of passive techniques, frequently filming for hours at a time hoping to capture something interesting naturally whilst a voiceover fills in the narrative and facts as it goes along.  This... is not really possible for our documentary subject so we cannot bring those techniques over for our documentary.  Historical documentaries, however, are very presenter led and combine lots of file footage with interviews with experts and sections where the host talks to the camera.  These techniques we can use in our documentary if we so choose...

Q5] Do you watch documentaries when they originally premiere on TV, record them to watch later on or both?


Here we got a nice variety of answers.  By far and away, the most picked option was "Both" with "Record To Watch Later" next and "Watch When They Originally Premiere" close behind that.  Seeing as "Watching Live" is the least chosen response, we may wish to stay away from channels and organisations with adverts.  DVRs allow viewers to simply skip the adverts and if more of our audience is saving a program to watch later instead of watching it live, it's far more likely to cost us advertisers and, thusly, our budget from the channel/institution that's funding us.

Q6] If you watch them live, what time do you usually watch them?

By leaving our answer option as "open", we have slightly muddled the average responses, seeing as many people found plenty of different ways to say much the same thing.  Of our 12 answers (one of our survey responders chose to skip the question), all but one responded with a time-frame in the evening.  The person who did not give an evening time simply responded "Whenever they're on".  But, as for the evening responses, 8 PM was the most frequent.  Consequently, we should tailor our content to be pre-watershed; no swearing and no extreme or brutal violence.

Q7] What channel(s) do you usually watch documentaries on?

Again, we left our answer option as "open" but this was to accommodate any American responders.  They don't have most of our channels, like ITV1 or Channel 4, so this way they too can still answer and not feel like they have to skip out (plus, this gives us the chance to figure out foreign distribution angles, if we wished).  Nevertheless, most responders were British as evidenced by the overwhelming responses for the BBC.  Some also mentioned Channel 4, giving us an alternative channel if the BBC should fall through, but we should focus on getting this doc distributed by the BBC as people are most likely to watch it on one of their channels.  In addition, the BBC doesn't have adverts, tying back into the results of Question 5.

Q8] If you don't watch documentaries when they premiere, what catch-up do you use to view them?

This is, essentially, an extension of question 7.  Again, by leaving the answer option as "open" we were able to accommodate all answers from all parties.  The most common answer type involved online catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer and 4oD, further cementing our choice of channels from Question 7.  A couple of answers noted DVDs and, subsequently, Disc Rental Services.  We could look at trying to get our documentary onto home video formats once the whole process is done; Documentary DVDs make good business, after all.

Q9] Would you be willing to watch a documentary that focusses on videogames?

A simple yes/no question resulted in a 100% "yes" response.  This proves that there is a market for our documentary series and we can use this data to convince networks and institutions to give us the funding required for our documentary.

For the second part of the survey, we got 11 responders; two less than the first part.  This can likely be attributed to both the end of the first survey not containing an immediate link to the second survey (meaning that some people will have gotten the impression that the survey was over) or the fact that the questions of the second survey were almost entirely about videogames (thus causing it to be redundant to people who don't play videogames).

These questions are mainly to get a sense of what people believe about games and the target of this installment in our documentary series, women in games.  For the most part, these are not going to affect the tone, style etc. of our documentary.  They may be used to for facts and figures in the actual piece, but it's most likely that they'll simply be used to gain a sense of what our audience is like.

Q1] How often (if at all) do you play videogames?

By leaving the answer option "open" we allowed our responders to be specific in their answers; getting a good feel for exactly how often they play games.  The majority of responses indicate daily gaming, with just one saying that they don't play them at all, although a lot of our survey participants were unsure with just how long they play games for.  Many answers have question marks next to them.  Regardless, this means that most of our target audience will be insanely knowledgeable about games, so we definitely need to ensure that our facts are straight.

Q2] What genre of videogames do you usually play?

We also left this answer option open, though on reflection it would have been easier to make it a simple multi-choice answer.  As such, it makes rounding up answers into categories, easily definable and number-crunchable categories a bit of a pain.  Regardless, the most popular ones are First Person Shooter and Action Adventure games.  This could be because they are the most prolific genres, combined they make up pretty much 3/5 of games released each year, or it may be that our audience just really likes those games.  Either way, they do provide a good pool for our file footage for the documentary.

Q3] If you play videogames, how many feature female protagonists (main characters)?

Again, this answer option was left "open", but this was due to the possible responses having to be really vague (some, most, etc.) otherwise.  Most answers were of the "1 or 2" variety, and a pair of responders gave specific examples (one noting, "Gears Of War 3 (Anya Stroud) and Resident Evil" and the other one putting, "Lara Croft only main one I can think of off the top of my head").  Again, this is good factual information that we can put into our documentary whilst putting our own personal spin on it.

Q4] What's the first thing that comes to mind when "videogames" and "women" are used in the same sentence?

Another "open" answer.  Of our answers, the words that most commonly cropped up were "damsel", "distress", "Tomb Raider" and "Lara Croft".  Outside of that, sentiments remain the same.  Sexism, voyerism, "pixel pin-ups"... it seems that our audience is knowledgable about the problems facing depictions of women in games today and, consequently, we should avoid talking down to them about the situation.

Q5] Which of the following character(s) do you prefer (based on actual character)?

This was a simple, "pick one from this list" answer type (closed) which comes with a snag.  For our set of answers, we chose a variation of characters that each had separate established character traits.  The problem is, that in order to do that, we had to go rather obscure in some places.  Nothing too obscure that people who frequent the Internet wouldn't be able to recognise (which is why we picked SHODAN from System Shock), but still very unlikely for the average person to recognise.

As such, the fact that Lara Croft is the top pick comes as very little shock, and the fact that Princess Peach is second (and a very distant second at that) comes even less of a shock.  Having said that, every character on the ballot received one vote, implying that at least some of our audience are rather knowledgeable about game characters.  Upon further reflection, it would probably have been a smart idea to both allow responders to pick more than one option and to allow them to explain why they chose the option that they did, in order to get a better insight into our audience.

Q6] What is your opinion on Hottest Gaming Characters lists?

Lots of very opinionated answers here, thanks to the "open" answer type.  Plenty were in the negative side (one even stating that it "backs up [his] answer to Q4") and most frequently used words were "creepy" and "sexist".  The most intelligent and well-written answer that we came across was as follows.  "A tad odd, as something made out of renders and polygons cannot REALLY be 'hot'. They just seem to be set up to appeal to a niche market."  And then we had someone actually critiquing the list based on who they thought should have been where.  Moving on.

Q7] If you answered no to Question 3 in Part 1 of our survey, would you be interested in watching a documentary about videogames?

Three people responded to this question, even though every answer from Part 1 was in the affirmative.  Nevertheless, two people answered "yes" and the third put the condition of "as long as it's good".  Now, that seemingly goes without saying, but it does mean that there are people who aren't necessarily into videogames who are willing to give the documentary a go as long as it's good.  That's genuinely useful info that we can use.