This week Kim headed off to the U S of A but that didn’t mean a break for us documentarians in Go out Into the World and do Good Things, because our second project brief was due: the video essay.

The brief for the video essay was fairly broad, as it’s a fairly broad genre. We had to produce a 3-5 minute video from our own personal perspective that explored some of our initial ideas regarding our final project. It would be part pitch, part research journey and part teaser trailer.

All the readings we had about video essays spoke about the importance of the authorial voice, and because Dungeons and Dragons players are my focus for the final project, I was immediately inspired by the role of the dungeon master in the game. Basically, the dungeon master is the person who narrates the story and guides the players through their quest. Because this seemed to me to be similar to the way in which the authorial voice guides viewers through a video essay, I thought I could do something a little bit different and turn my video essay into an interactive game of D&D.

Of course, I still wanted to actually convey the information I’d discovered through my research, and emphasise my argument that D&D players are not the lonely, incapable geeks that they are often portrayed as. To demonstrate this point, I created a video in which the viewer is invited to roll a dice to choose a ‘character’. Each of the options took them to a branch of the story where something good or bad happened to them depending on the number of the dice roll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZzSg-sPVt4

I was only able to create one place where the videos branched off, as it was too labour-intensive to multiply the options by six again, so it wasn’t as interactive as it could have been. I also think that the attempt to create a more narrative-based focus detracted somewhat from the video being an ‘essay’ as it was less formal and less informational. However, as this project brief was fairly broad, I don’t regret going down this path with my video because I think it was a little bit more interesting than a standard video essay comprised solely of found videos, images and text and I think it did successfully convey the ideas that I wanted it to.