Audiences and institutions Essay

To what extent is digital distribution vital to the media area you have studied?   

Media Area: Video Games  

David Chikezie

Digital Distribution of games has been a thing since the 1980s it was only with network advancements in bandwidth capabilities in the 2000s that digital distribution of video games really became preeminent, Digital distribution is extremely vital to the gaming industry and contributes to a lot of its success. The games industry relies on a rapid production and innovation cycle, one that actively enforces hardware obsolescence. It seems everyday consoles like the Xbox One, PS4, and the WII U are becoming more and more cloud based and distancing away from the outdated physical hardware we grew up with. Companies like Microsoft are adapting and creating new digital only consoles to boost their audiences by proving a more productive way to sell products.

To begin with, Content distributed online may be streamed or downloaded, and often consists of books, films and television programs, music, software, and video games. Streaming involves downloading and using content as soon as the consumer wants. they rathe allowing a user to store it permanently. In contrast, fully downloading content to a hard drive or other form of storage media may allow offline access in the future. According to the case study  “Digital Games Distribution: The Presence of the Past and the Future of Obsolescence” “The move to digital distribution has already begun to reduce the need of transportation and mobility, but this currently signals only further support of planned, and technological obsolescence, increasing the rate at which the commodities for recording, storing, distributing and exhibiting digital content become wasted” this case study explains some of the pros of digital distribution in contrast to physical distribution such as the Eco friendly side to online distribution, Disc are harmful to the planet and contain substances like polycarbonate plastic and aluminum.

In another case study, author Chad Hadzinsky agrees to the notion that the video game industry relies on digital distribution to sell productively. The case study states Digital distribution of video games is becoming increasingly common, with major publishers and retailers paying more attention to digital sales, including Steam, PlayStation Store, Amazon.com, GAME, GameStop, and others. According to new  statistics, the volume of digital distribution of video games worldwide was $6.2 billion per month in February 2016 and reached $7.7 billion per month in April 2017, its evident that digital distribution is vital, but with looming problems in the world, for example, the coronavirus pandemic causing many stores and businesses to be closed, digital distribution provides many video games retailers to continue making money

Personally, I buy all my games digitally because I can share my games and movie with family and friends, I can play offline and I don’t have to travel to my local GameStop. It is more convenient for a lot of people and that’s why I think it will take over the gaming and video industries as the premiant distribution method. Furthermore, in this case study of digital distribution of the gaming industry authored by Frank Alpert, we are showed the cons of digital distribution, according to the case study “depending on location, the price of a digital game upon release can be substantially greater than its retail version. Even on sales, digital titles can rarely compete with the price of a physical version of the same game. “Alpert also brings up how, you have the option to sell or trade the game to other people if you wanted to. With digital distribution, you only have the option to play the game on your account alone, providing less portability.

In conclusion, Digital distribution has played a huge role in the growth of the gaming industry, I will continue to use digital to buy my movies and games, as more innovation is taking place companies are becoming more and more digital based and growing their business off digital technology. The way you distribute your product is very important to the growth of your product, and major companies are taking precautions to make sure there product are distributed properly.

Hotel Babylon Practice Extract

Hotel Babylon Practice Extract David Chikezie



I thought the theme of this Extract was Ethnicity Representation and how minorities are looked are different in business and work, the extract shows immigrants working at a English hotel the way the minority actors are forced to hide as someone looks for them with an immigration service shows the color representation problems in society today. In the clip we see men walk into a hotel with suits talking to a lady with a suit, all dressed well with high roles in the hotel, we can assume she is the manager or front desk.

In the first scenes we see some close ups on the manager of the hotel, these were added to show the emotion in the lady’s face, we also see close up on the immigration officers face, these close up were used to intimidate the audience and hint that something intense could be coming up, there was also many over the shoulders shots over the shoulder of the manager to show her point of view and give the viewers a frame of who the character is talking to. The Officer quickly and angrily takes his ID out to get access to the premises, the director showcase Ethnicity representation by showing the scenes where they all panickily run into the storage room, their panic and close up of their faces capture their true emotions and show how important it is for them to no get caught, We are shown how important it is for them to hide because the extreme close up to the lock of closet door. When Jackie, a Chinese Native that also works for the English hotel gathers all the immigrants to the storage room, she counts the people present, she then says, “Ibrahim is missing”. This is shown by the quick zoom out of her face, which allows the audience to see her panic

To continue, another example of ethnicity being misrepresented is when the worker faints we then see a quick zoom out of Jackie. Jackie’s face shows her panic because she does not know what to do, we then see a close to a man who immediately steps into action, He tells the crowd that this woman is diabetic and very quickly solves the problem by putting sweet jam on her gums, this shows that the immigrants are very intelligent and have past jobs, we get a zoom to the woman regaining consciousness, the man that saved her followed with dialogue saying “ I was not always a cleaner” this dialogue advances the theme because It shows that the immigrants are falsely mistreated and misrepresented, the way the immigrant officer looks at he thinks that immigrants steal jobs and commit crime, but this scene shows how useful they can be and how they care for others.

Although, the most significant representation of ethnicity happens in the beginning when a man in a suit is asked by the front desk lady to “take the purple advocate slips downstairs” we later learn this has a alternate meaning of hide the immigrants, the officer are here. This tells the viewer this could happen more often then we originally think, . Dramatic, non-diegetic music plays in the background, allowing Tensions to build and make the scene intense. One significant difference we see between the officers and the hotel workers they are looking for is their outfits. We see as the immigration officer only hut down people with less well-dressed outfits. They instantly take it Ibrahim because of his nature and the clothes he was wearing, the assumed as if he didn’t belong. This develops the theme by showing people are quick to judge by what they hear or what they are told instead of trusting their own judgement.

Furthermore, to advance the them we then hear non-diegetic, slow, sad music as we see Jackie remove Ibrahim’s possessions from his locker. We are shown a side on medium close up of her getting emotional from looking at his possession the editing and the clamps make us really see how much see takes keeping these immigrants safe. Later, we see a cafeteria area, where we see different races of people gather together at different tables, we also hear ambient sound of dialogue in different language which shows the diversity in the actors. We can see although a member has gone missing they are continuing normal living this shows me that things like this could happen regularly and they are used to losing people to immigration officers. The clip end in silence with a fade out, to show the missing of Ibrahim on the last table.

To sum it all up, Hotel Babylon shows a lot of different representations of ethnicity, by showing immigration officers fighting to keep their jobs by arresting innocent people, or desperate immigrants running to save their lives. Living a minimum wage job. This theme shows how a group of people could be discredited and mistreated.

Final Product CCR

I made my CCR in an interview format, I answered the 4 questions while speaking to a camera. I put a lot of effort into perfecting this video, following all the guidelines and requirements. I inserted numerous images and videos into the video to make it more interesting. Additionally, I inserted the song that I seen replicate a talk show outro and intro. I am immensely proud of my product, and I am very happy to end this course off on a well thought out project.

My Final Product

This is my Final media studies product I put an immense amount of effort into this film, and for that reason I am very proud of it. In my opinion, this was a fairly professional production, and by far my finest work. It was the culmination of all the skills and filming techniques that I have learned over the course of the year. In the end I utilized everything that I learned, and I am very pleased with the outcome.

My Music Video

This was the second project we created this year. The music video is for the song lazy song. We picked this song because it is calming and lighthearted. We included visuals of sunsets to show how the songs is calming and reflects the happiness of summer. We included us dancing to bright lights to show how fun the song feels. I am most proud of how the editing came out in this video because the clips go along with the beat of the music in a way.

My Commercial

; our commercial that my group and I worked on in the beginning of the year. This was the first project my group and I received so we had very little experience. Despite our lack of experience, I think our commercial came out good. My group and I were very happy with the final product and we feel that we learned a lot from doing this commercial. My group and I chose to do this commercial on the clothing Nike, and I directed, acted and assisted with the editing process.

Re-editing Blog: Final Steps

The re-editing stage of our film included multiple details of our production. Whereas sound was easy there were many other aspects we had to edit in this stage. Firstly, I had to edit in the new clip that we re-filmed into our final product. I also made sure that the clip was short enough to be inserted in our movie correctly. This was necessary in order to make the final film length within the time limits. Then, I had to move the titles to the new clip. Since the shot was brand new in the film, it did not yet have our titles on it. In order to assimilate this clip into our movie correctly, I had to insert our titles in it. Once I accomplished this, our film flowed smoothly and seemed almost complete.

As a last edit to our film,we adding a the end scene This was intended to be an increase to the degree of professionalism in the movie. Once this was complete, our product was finalized. My group and I then reviewed our completed work. After some minor review, we concluded that the product we had would be our last one that we would submit. When everything seemed perfect, we exported it. As the last stage of our production came to a close, Ultimately, I felt extremely proud of the work that my group and I had done. It was a large undertaking, and I felt extremely accomplished. The fact that our final product was extremely well produced made the feelings of pride and joy that much better.

Editing blog Ordering

Today I began editing what I have so far for my final task. I had a lot of extra time to edit since we don’t have any school this week due to the COVID-19 virus going around. All Broward Schools closed so I have time to edit. However, I hope everything gets solved soon so we can be back to school sooner than later. It will be more difficult considering that I won’t have access to tie school’s editing software or their computers.

I first inserted my SD card into my laptop. It had trouble reading it so I had to reinsert a few times for it to work. I opened up the folder in my SD card and put all of it in a new folder I created in my laptop. I ejected the SD card and took it out the slot on the side of my laptop. I then imported all the videos to the editing software I used. I used iMovie, like I did for all my other projects. It seems like the easiest to use. I’ve gotten very familiar with it since the beginning of this journey and plan on using it for the rest of it. I didn’t get much editing done today. I chose the videos I would be using for my final task. I chose the best shot I took and if there was anything wrong, I knew I could reshoot later. I also put the videos in order. I referred to my storyboard and started with scene 1 and scene 2 and so forth. I ended up with 26 scenes. The last thing I did was crop the videos. Some of them had me talking in the beginning when I should’ve have been. There were also some where it’s my sister getting into character to play the girl. Those extra bits aren’t part of the actual movie so I just trimmed them.

Re-film Blog First Problem

In my movie we wanted to make it look as real as possible so we included a scene with fake blood in it. In our re-filming process, we attempted to add more detail to this aspect of our film. However, we could not find the fake blood that we used in our original scene. Our first choice to waste time finding the original fake blood. On the other hand, we could attempt to find a replacement for the fake blood. Every actor gave their individual input on what they thought was the best option. In the end, we decided to use a replacement for our prop.

 The prop that we chose to use as a replacement for fake blood was a Red dark deep ink pen. We decided on using this prop because the ink from the pen could be used to look similar to fake blood. With this red pen, we drew what looked like blood on the hand of our actor. Overall, this worked out reasonably well. The red pen ink ended up resembling the fake blood better than I expected. It also looked similar in the scene that we re-filmed. In our re-filming shot, the red ink looked very similar to the fake blood that we had previously used. Ultimately, I was very satisfied with how the modified prop looked in our re-filming shot. My group members were also pleased with the outcome of our improvisation. Thus, we universally decided to use this re-filming shot in our complete film.

Editing Blog Adding Titles

In this part of editing we had to add title to identify who did what in the film I aided in the selection of certain titles during the process. There are different styles of titles, and I helped choose the ones that we were going to use. I made sure to make the titles in our film visible. Visibility is a very important aspect in terms of titles. This is due to the fact that the audience needs to actually see who worked on the film. If the titles blend into the background or are too faint, for example, the audience cannot see this.
The titles in our film give credit to the group members that played various roles in film production. There are various titles addressing the numerous roles played, Different titles shows how important show jobs were as to others, I was the hacker in the film so the titles i edited in twas able to highlight that ti the viewer.

Editing blog: Adding Transitions

I included a variety of transitions. Some examples of these are: fade in, fade out, black out, jumpcut, and cross blur animation transitions. We inserted jump cuts because it was the perfect ending to the scene. After the main character in our film opened the door to find nobody there, we inserted the black out. It left the audience anting to know more, and the black out was fit to match this curiosity. We inserted the jumpcut to show the passage of time. In the film story, a lot more time is passing than in real life. Thus, we thought the jumpcut was perfect for this scene. Finally, we inserted the blur. 

 We decided on Sony Vegas pro  because our project does not include a lot of special effects, and iMovie only works well for simple editing. So, we had to combine all of our footage for our peer edit. We did this by importing all the footage  to one computer and phone so editing would be easier 

Editing Blog First Attempt

I have started our editing process. The first step of editing was dumping our film footage. I imported my footage into iMovie. then I selected the scenes that we would be editing in our first editing session. I put a lot of thought into which scenes would fit the best in our final movie. To determine this, we selected scenes with a certain number of specific attributes. These included things like the lighting of the scene, as well as the camera angles and movement. In addition, we considered how our titles and credits would fit into the scene. Finally, we chose takes in which the acting was the best. All in all, our editing process was very detailed and in-depth.

 I have decided that we will work on inserting our titles near the end of the editing process. I chose to do this because it allows us to work on polishing our scenes beforehand. During the editing of our scenes, we did a lot of polishing up. For example, I searched for non-copyright music to include in our final product. Once I added that music I verified it was sourced by a non copyright brand by going to website made to check and verifying . I had to in group the natural sound of the videos and delete the real sound then add the music /sound effects and make it sound smooth

Peer Review Blog

What is one thing you REALLY liked about the film?

Overall I really enjoyed the film this group put together. Specifically I enjoyed how they were able to tie in all of the elements of the genre into the opening sequence. The film is about a boy being assigned to a mission and having to say goodbye to his family. It is apart of the tragedy film genre and incorporates a lot of the conventions. For example, regarding the lighting, it is very well throughout. Everything is visible and nothing is too bright or dark. Another element that was well incorporated was the sound. Most things could be heard, the sound level was even, and there was no sharp changes in sound that were unnatural. Furthermore, the movie included various shots/angles/movements that were needed to satisfy the genre and the requirements. For example, an establishing shot, close up, medium shot, low angles, and over-the-shoulder shot could all be seen, just to name a few. Finally, I really enjoyed the titles. They were evenly spaced and legible is all scenes.

What is one suggestion you would make to the film?

Despite the film being overall very well produced, there are a few suggestions I would make to the creators. A glaring issue is the duration of the film. As of currently, the film lasts approximately 1 minutes and 25 seconds. This is well above the guidelines of 1:50-2:00. I would Add the beginning scenes of pulling into the drive away and other aspects in order to shorten the film. Another issue was how loud the dialogue was. I would recommend the creators increase the sound of the dialogue in order to make it understandable. However, a quick disclaimer, I was in a noisy room and this may been apart of the reason it was hard to ear. Overall, I believed the film this group produced was very well made and only needs minor corrections.

Filming blog Filming Process

Today was the second day I went out to film. I managed to film two more scenes. The locations I went to were the train tracks and park. I didn't have to go to two different locations since they're right next to each other. I started filming the train track scene first. It didn't take too long since there weren't that many different shot in the scene. I managed to include an over the shoulder shot in the scene.

After that I filmed the next scene. The next scene included a pan and a diegetic sound. This was the shot of me trying to explain the misson. However, it did not go as well as we hoped since we encountered some difficulties. The first being it was bright and sunny outside, so it was hard to figure out the lighting on camera so it looked like it was nighttime. We tried to fix this issue by adjusting the blinds on the window and getting it just right to make the light outside appear to be moonlight. Then, once we got this problem taken care of we encountered another issue.We filmed on the stairs, in the bedroom, and in the hallway. Just as we did downstairs, we filmed each scene a couple times. Some of the scenes were difficult to get because it was only the two of us. We did not have anyone to help us film, so only one of us could be in the shot at a time. But, it ended up working out and making the film look more interesting and dramatic. We filmed all the scenes for our entire movie. But, we plan to get together again Sunday and re-film some shots. We want to film the shots again to get some better ones if possible, and to also have extra clips just incase. On Sunday, we also plan to edit the majority of our video. On Tuesday in class, some of our classmates will be watching the first draft of our edited video. They will be peer reviewing our video and giving us feedback on how to make it better.

Filming Blog The Beginning

1. Today, my group mate and I decided to begin filming some scenes for our movie. After school, we drove to my house. My group mate could not stay for long because he was Tobe home sooner. Because of this, we chose to just do some practice shots. We looked at our storyboard and went scene by scene deciding where we were going to film each one. For the kitchen scene, we obviously chose to film in the kitchen. What we really needed to focus on was figuring out what rooms to place the intruder and the victim. We also needed to figure out how we could make the sounds we wanted to have in our movie. We decided to use my moms bedroom to film one of the scenes because it fit the idea of our movie the best. We did get some actual footage as well. Since we did not have much time, we wanted to go through and just practice filming each scene to see if we liked the camera angles and movements we planned on using. We also played around with the lighting. We wanted to make sure we were able to set the right mood in the scenes with the lighting and angles

Filming blog The plan

Today I started filming and i was forced to make difficult decisioms early. I decided to use my own camera and SD card for this project so that's where I started. I headed to Best Buy to buy an SD card. I wasn't sure how much storage I needed but I got a 64 GB SD card. It seems like a lot but I often use my camera to film or take pictures that are not for this project. When I got back home, I realized I forgot to buy a tripod. I was going to go back to Best Buy to buy one but then I remembered I could borrow one from school. Since I didn't have a tripod, I couldn't get most shots done. However, I was able to film some shots. Before I did, I encountered some problems with my camera. For some reason, it didn't let me record. Every time I hit the record button, it said: "Movie recording has been stopped automatically." I tried turning it off and turning it back on, but nothing changed. The same message appeared on the screen. After doing some research online, I figured out a few ways on how I could fix it. I first tried removing the SD card and inserting it again. Luckily, that was exactly what it needed for it to work. I hit the record button again and it began recording. I then was able to film a few scenes before the day ended. I recorded the first, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and twelveth scene. It wasn't much but I'm sure I will be able to do more next time.

Planning blog Storyboard

I have composed multiple Google Slides regarding my Final Task and various aspects of the filming process. In the presentations I reviewed each element individually and discussed important elements that will be used. For instance, I talk about the shots/movements/angles, safety, actors, props, costumes, and settings. Additionally, I also include any extra information. This would include things like needing to remain extra quiet during the filming of the early morning scenes. Information like this was necessary for preparing the storyboard for the opening sequence. In the storyboard each square or shot represents a 6 second time period. On each piece of paper there are 6 squares, and each piece of paper represents a scene Overall, I believe between the previous google slides and their scripts with the storyboard will prove very useful in constructing my Final Task.

Planning Blog: Title Design

 Attached is my title design slides. I discussed everything concerning the titles being used in my final task. I included the working title, which is "You're Next." I feel like it is a good title for this movie because the antagonist is planning to kill the protagonist in this movie This title design applies to the escape to paradise affect of the film and highlights the theme of escape.

Planning Blog: Location, Participants, Health, and Schedule

Attached are my Google slides. It includes the location, participants, health information, and schedule for my final task. The majority of the participants are me because I will be working alone. However, I will be receiving help from my friends because they will play some side roles and my mom will be the safety team. I have also made a schedule for the next 3 weeks. I will plan on sticking to it unless any unexpected changes occur. I included pictures of the location. I will be filming in my friends house. I will be rearranging things in my house to make it seem more like a planning room and a dark location. I also included information on health and safety. It includes everything that will be done on filming days to avoid anything from going wrong.

Planning blog: Sound Script

As opposed to our Shooting Script, this presentation is not separated by each scene. However, every 3 scenes are on a different slide. This is because our film has much action. But it does not have as much sound. Some scenes has the words “no dialogue.” This is not meant to signal that there is no sound in the scene. This is meant to signal that no characters say anything in the scene. Most scenes have a moment where a noise, big or small, has taken place. The specific causes of the noises offscreen have yet to be decided. However, they will remain true to the story on screen.