The Giant Bomb Show Pilot (A Video Editing Exercise)
By TepidShark 9 Comments
I seem to recall Jeff once saying that if they managed to work out a deal so that Giant Bomb could be on TV, he would do that, as he wants their content to ultimately be everywhere. However, if something like that were to happen, I doubt Giant Bomb would be interested in producing a bunch of original content specifically for TV. Instead they would probably prefer to take a bunch of their pre-existing content and re-purpose it for TV.
So for an editing exercise, I took a few quick looks from the site edited them down to fit within about 44 minutes and wrapped in what a TV style presentation might look like. I will describe some of my editing decisions at the bottom of this post but generally my editing decisions were guided by the audience being people who aren't familiar with Giant Bomb and/or who don't follow video games as closely as some of us do. But it was still important to keep Giant Bomb's point of view in that they are half informational and half entertaining. So, with that mind you can view a playlist of the show here or below is the show in parts (because I don't want to pay google money to upload a 45 min video). Either way, imagine there being a commercial break in between the parts.
Part 1:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Part 6:
Methods to my Madness
- I chose the quick looks that I did because I wanted ones where the guys were on screen so somebody not familiar with who they are could associate a name with a face. If they were to do this for real they would probably go with more recent quick looks for sure. Could have put Wii stuff in there but that stuff wasn't in HD.
- Since the quick looks I chose were from the old office, I thought I should be consistant and use footage in the intro from the old office. Again if they were to do this for real they would probably use stuff from the current office.
- I do not intend to diminish the work that Dave & Drew do for the site by giving them a "with" credit, they are not in quick looks as often as the others, but more importantly they are not in any of the quick looks I chose to use. And yes Alex Navarro does work for the site, but he does not appear in videos anymore.
- I admit that editing down the quick looks makes it a little jumpey. I did consider putting transitions between my cuts but I thought it too weird to have a dissolve or something every few seconds. So this probably the better of the two outcomes.
- The model for the technical structure of the piece was how BBC America edits Top Gear. The big thing that came from that was the coming up bumpers.
- I personally don't have some moral thing against swearing but as the idea was that this would be on TV generally swearing is bleeped (Plus it is kind of fun to put in bleeps). Different channels handle it differently but generally it seemed like in my research I found that "fuck", "shit", "ass-hole (but not ass)", and any direct references to sex are bleeped. I kept double-entendres in, but I don't really know if I was supposed to or not.
- Small note: in the Kinectimals quick look I do know that Arthur Gies is no longer with Joystiq, but I thought I should keep him as being from Joystiq out of consistency.
Things that could be added or changed
- I considered giving them jokey job titles for their tags. For example, I was thinking about in the Sports Champions quick look tagging Ryan as a "Sports Champion" and Jeff as a "Coach of Sports Champions". I didn't do it because I figured people unfamiliar with who these guys are would want to know who they actually are. However, I could have easily gone towards jokey tags because it fits with Giant Bomb's personality.
- Didn't have time to implement this, but I thought it could have been a cool idea to put fun facts that the guys don't mention in the video. I thought of this while watching the recent Sleeping Dogs quick look. In that one, they don't know what the name of Hong Kong's currency is. You could pop up a thing that says, "The currency in Hong Kong is Hong Kong dollars"
PS. Final Cut Pro 7 was what I used.
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