The final project I am going to create for my thesis is a video following TCNJ’s best Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players as they compete in tournaments throughout the semester. This video will incorporate my editing and storytelling skills, and I will try to learn motion graphics to improve the quality of the video. The three prototypes I will create will be tests that will gain my classmates’ opinions on different editing and graphical styles. Since I will be working with footage taken over the spring semester for my final project, I will use footage from the Collegiate Starleague qualifier at Rutgers on October 20th and from Stronghold #5 on November 1st for the prototypes. Unfortunately this will consist of mostly phone recordings but if possible I will use cameras rented from the AIMM Cage in my final project.

Prototype 1 will consist of a few rough edits of the footage I have taken in order to gauge what narrative styles viewers prefer and whether my shots and camera work can be improved. At the Collegiate Starleague qualifier I did a brief interview with the captain of the Smash team, Anthony Mendez, and took some recordings of the players on the team discussing strategies in between games. This prototype could test whether I should keep my own voice in the footage, and whether I should keep in the interviews and between-match footage or cut them out entirely to focus on only the matches. I may also try to change the order and length of specific sections of the footage to find what fits best.

Prototype 2 will be an experiment to see which motion graphic techniques and styles I should include in the final video. I have ideas for how I want to present the player head-to-heads and the stock count and scores of the matches and I want to test them and gain feedback from viewers. I will do this by taking certain scenes from the rough edit and making multiple versions of graphics to put over them, then asking viewers which version they prefer and whether any of them could be improved.

The third prototype will take what I learned from the first two prototypes and combine them to create one or more “rough drafts” that represent what the final project hopes to accomplish. I will gain additional feedback on what viewers would like to see in the video, whether any more footage or graphics should be cut out or edited, and whether they thought the overall video was interesting enough to present at the fall show.