THE CALL OF DUTY KID

The Call of Duty Kid

The Call of Duty Kid set of works is a number of videos where I have filmed myself from a variety of different angles playing the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a first person shooter set in the middle east.

The idea for this set of videos came from looking at Robbie Coopers work titled  ‘immersion’ in his set of videos he filmed a number of school children around the London area. From the set of videos he wanted see how much the player actually gets into the games. While the children were playing he asked a number of questions, from asking the set of questions he learnt that while he was asking the questions the children’s eyes never left the screen. This is quite amazing  because the children were but in a strange setting that they have never been before but yet their interest in videos games allowed them to mentally seclude themselves in this quite public atmosphere.

This idea of watching people interested me a lot because for one thing I have never seen it done in such away before, secondly I see a lot of potential in filming people playing games. What I would develop on from Robbie Cooper’s work would be a greater range of mode subjects.

Gamers are often perceived as teenage boys in their bedroom, with no social life.

By using a larger range of ages and sexes in this filming would comment on this view of who gamers are.

My first step for developing this technique was to recreate it; this is my Call of Duty Kid set of videos.  During the filming I tried three different angles, mid shot, close up of my head and close up of my hands.

 Mid-shot: The camera is directly in front of me, showing the chest up to the head. This was the shot used in Robbie Coopers work. The good thing about this shot is you can see all body movement all the shuffles and fidgets reacting to the action on the screen. The only criticism about this shot is, will the viewer know what’s actually going on in the shot.

Close-up head: A portrait type shot showing the top of the shoulders and full head in frame. What really draws me to this shot is the fact that I wear glasses and you are able to see the reflection of PC monitor in them.  This solves my problem to extent with the mid-shot and the viewer maybe not knowing what is going on, and what I’m trying to say.

Close-up hands: The least successful of my shots in my opinion, I placed the camera, level with my hand and documented the movement while played the game. I think this shot could be developed further by maybe testing a variety of different camera angles and constructing the shot further.

In conclusion the set of shots were a success, I have experimented with Robbie Coopers style of work and now can move on to develop it further with a greater selection of people. A continuing problem while filming shots was the amount of light, I want there to be enough light so the person is visible but then I have to balance with the amount of noise with the camera trying to compensate.  All I will need to do is get the balance between shutter speed and the amount of light I apply in the scene