I’ll begin this piece by sharing that I unfortunately was unable to attend the Assessment 3 Presentations due to it being the day after my wisdom teeth surgery. Though I’ve heard good things from my group members, alas I was unconscious at the time.
Knowing that this was going to be an issue, myself and another group member who was also absent prepared our teammates by writing up scripts for what we planned to say. It was in this position that I felt that, as the team member who wrote the original pitch, that I should cover the overview of the story. I wrote up the script in the speakers notes and created the corresponding slide for it.
In terms of the feedback we received, my group members sent it through to us via our Facebook group chat as a list of notes. Looking at the notes and the follow up chat we had on the Friday of that week, the feedback was less about the idea but more technical advice for the execution of the idea. This was a great motivator for our group as none of us have raised our hands as being particularly tech-savvy, but we were all quite confident with the way the script had developed.
The main piece of advice that we took away was exploring the editing practices around “deep fakes” in order to pull off the ‘Act 2’ conference with the range of dictators. In particular, the note that we don’t necessarily need to involve costumes and makeup, but that we could achieve the same effect with some simple editing. This was the angle we chose to go with as we agreed it was less labour-intensive and would achieve greater consistency in the production quality standard.
We got very lucky when it came to the filming set up. It was suggested that we film on Zoom or Quicktime for the green screen effect. Instead, once we cast my partner in the role of the news host, we were then able to access his presenter set up for his work. The only challenge this provided was that since it is a Chinese-owned company whose servers the video would be uploaded to, we did have to re-work the script to remove any references to Chinese dictatorships. In hindsight, I don’t think that cutting a Tiananmen Square joke hurt the piece overall.
Throughout post-production we have been able to trial the use of canned laughter as suggested and finesse the product to achieve the stylistic choices to capture the satirical news genre. Overall, this presentation and feedback gave us a lot of direction on the next steps for our project and a sense of optimism that we were on track to produce something we could all be proud of.