For the uninitiated or uninformed that are new to this student blog, in my youth, I have always had great aspirations of becoming a film critic for either a news company or my own private business. So far I have a YouTube channel with hundreds of subscribers, and have been using the channel for almost 5 years. I was always fascinated of the idea of watching movies (for free at a press screening or at a local cinema) and talking about them to many people including friends, family, classmates and whoever is out there willing to listen, but I always wondered what it was like once I hit that peak of fame and being recognized by fans for my occupation. One of those people who have reached that accomplishment is film reviewer on YouTube, Sean Chandler.

Sean Chandler started his channel, Sean Chandler Talks About, in summer of 2016 and now has a total of over 140,000 subscribers on YouTube page. Before the creation of his movie blog, he started his first movie website during his years in high school which he said didn’t get anywhere, he would always be a part of IMDb message boards, and would be in the comment section to websites such as Collider, and of course YouTube. In terms of inspiration, he addressed that in 2011 the first batch of movie reviewers gained traction such as Chris Stuckmann, Jeremy Jahns and especially John Campea, who created a precursor called “For Your Consideration” (before the installation of “Movie Talk” which he would known for in the long run) and he would view it from episode one and beyond.

His most popular video to date is “All 21 MCU Villains Ranked From Worst to Best (w/ Kilmonger from Black Panther)”

He started up his first demo video in May 2013 for about three years for every six months and wasn’t as successful as he hoped, but in summer of 2016, as he was unemployed for several months and had free time on his own accord decided to apply his creativity energy go somewhere and over the course of his channel uploading review after review which gained not as much traction, his popular ranking videos on such franchises like Star Trek and the Marvel Cinematic Universe skyrocketed his channel into tremendous success attracting more views than he could imagine. But was it all just by being lucky?

“There’s always a side of luck anytime you have significant success to other people around you,” said Chandler, “you’re either really that egotistical or really that talented. There’s always some luck, especially with YouTube.”

His latest review of “1917”.

When asked him about a quote from a YouTube movie reviewer that there is a distinction between a movie critic, who is much more negative and critical, whereas movie reviewers are more easygoing and expressive to others and they cultivate a community on YouTube, he answered that in his mind, he feels that in his mind for what does to find his place in world, he feels more comfortable agreeing with the statement.

“When you go from delivering paint, being in the comment section, watching people’s videos to being a certified critic on Rotten Tomatoes in a relatively short period of time” said Chandler, “I try to define what I am and how I perceive myself, I haven’t quite nailed anything yet…I default much more to the idea of being a movie reviewer and building community [and branding a YouTube channel]…”

Sean Chandler Talks About has been rapidly grown popularity and growth over the years and his consistency and drive for addressing movies to the public and how he feels towards specific film while generating videos for all the YouTube community to see is what makes him an admirable and inspiration figure to so many people.

“I think discovering people like John Campea planted a little seed in my mind that, when the time was right, changed the whole trajectory of my career,” said Chandler as he shares a story that would continue inspire others about second chances. “I was in a very bad place when I started my channel…the first two and a half years of my channel, I was delivering paint for a living. Picking up buckets of paint, going to construction sites, getting off work, washing the paint off of my hands and face and then shooting a video upstairs, editing, going to bed, and then waking up at 6 am to deliver paint again. I think there’s something inside of that that’s very powerful and profound for a lot of people. I try to intentionally share a story that could help other people, and people message me all the time saying, “I started my channel, because I was inspired by you” which is awesome. I know the people who were that for me, and it’s very cool to get to be that for somebody else.”

FULL INTERVIEW IN IT’S ENTIRETY BELOW

http://charlesy.create.stedwards.edu/2019/luke/

PITCHASSIGN3:

In this final assignment for my Journalism II class, it was pretty hard to think about what to go from here. After my first two assignments, I basically have done the unthinkable from my end. Maybe I’ll revert back to talking about video games or I’ll aim at a path towards talking about film critics and how they operate during a press screening. I’ll thin about it. Tuesday, DUE Dec. 10 @ 11:00a/MYSLIK/500-700/VIDEO/AUDIO

When you pop in a video game disc into the tray of your console of choice, whether it’s invented by their owners Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, what is the first thing you see upon your very first play-through experience? It would have to be the computer generated graphics. The level design, the scope and the digital construction of every building, forestation, gravel. The visual presentation of a game is one of the elements that can really entice people to purchase the next anticipated release. At the same time, we are very much intrigued as how such scale and innovation is put into a game’s graphic upon and after its release. To gather these substantial details, I made a trip towards Electronic Arts in Austin, TX, where I had the pleasure of meeting one of the graphic artists, Christian Clark, and he told me all of the secrets and insights of creating environments in specific levels and even weapons of certain action-adventure titles.

Clark is currently a Senior Environmental Artist for BioWare in Austin, TX and has been apart of BioWare/Electronic Arts for half a decade. After graduating in 2009 at Full Sail University, he started as an Environmental Artist for Spark Plug Games, creating still environments for iOS games such as Lost in Time: The Clockwork Tower, and he proceed to work as a Gun/Prop artist for The Binary Mill in Australia. Clark from 2011-2012, was also apart of Crystal Dynamics in San Francisco for the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider, as a Level/Weapons artist and was employed for two years at Schell Games, an educational gaming company in Pittsburgh, PA. Clark said that he always loved video games since he was a kid, and he considered working for a video game company, like BioWare to be a ‘dream job’. Admitting that he always liked playing BioWare’s video games and is currently inhabiting a job there, he said that experiences when transition from job to the next felt a bit “different” based on the company. But his time at BioWare felt like a dream come true.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more at home than I do now at BioWare.” Christian said, “I get along with everyone I work with. It was definitely different going from a company like Spark Plug Games where you are making a small iOS game, to a huge IP (Intellectual Property) like “Anthem” or “Mass Effect: Andromeda” or “Tomb Raider” where you are working with 500 people all working on the same project.”

When asked about his experiences from companies like Crystal Dynamics and Spark Plug Games before he went into his present occupation, Clark said the he did have those experiences working for his previous positions, and that every prior experience or knowledge you would have, you’re going to continue to learn more as time goes by, and the criticisms that comes in from other people are ‘super helpful’, and all of the hard effort might pay off in the aftermath of the game’s official release.

©Bioware – Artwork by Christian Clark

“When the game gets out the door, you’re really proud of it,” Clark said, “despite how it gets reviewed, you know that you put what you could have in that game, and you couldn’t have done it any better, at least as an artist. This is how your legacy will exist.”

The conversation went into a more in-depth turn when asked about the amount of time it takes to design a weapon in Tomb Raider (2013) or a solitary map in the open-world third-person shooter, Anthem. Clark said that there are a lot of disciplines that get involved when making a weapon in a video game. There is a Weapons animator who is focused on constructing the animation and motion of a weapon, like a shotgun that fires when you cock the weapon or reload — including the character holding the exact weapon, the VFX artist who concentrated on the rifle blasts, of the bullet shells popping out of the gun, and the Weapon artist (which is what he was) actually digitally drawing out the weapon. Clark said that weapon design will take nearly a moth or two because there so many things that an artist team can run into, such as a collision error when Lara Croft (the main character of the Tomb Raider series) is crouching and the gun she’s possessing is clipping through a wall. The weapons design for a weapon in Tom Raider as a whole usually takes about a a month or two, however, designing a map for Anthem was a much different story.

“For something like Anthem, it really depends on the size of the space.” Clark said, “You could have a small micro dungeon that could take a month and a half, you [can] have a whole open region that’ll take three years, it really just depends on what you are working on.”

©Bioware – Artwork by Christian Clark – VFX by Craig Moroney

In the future, there are going to be dozens of aspiring students who want to have the exact same job that Christian’s environmental design, and what he offered in terms of insight for students was that if the student wants for of a design/engineering occupation, it’s going to require a ton of math and programing, and understanding simple fundamentals to a game such as his example of Monopoly, understanding how the game is designed and plays out as displayed by the rules of the game. He also added that if there a people who would like to earn the aspirational position, they have to do work day in and day out, especially when there are schools pumping out students that have degrees in Video Game Design. Clark more importantly said that it’s a very large market and a difficult industry to get into and a hard one to stay in, and you would have to spend upwards of a thousand hours in order to gain full expertise.

“You have to love it. If you don’t love it and have a passion for it, there’s no point in getting into it.” Clark said, in his last statement, “If you have for it and you do have a passion for it, it wouldn’t even seem like work and [you’ll] be willing to putting in the time anyway.”

Christian Clark is a very fascinating individual when it comes to designing, manufacturing weapons, levels and entire sections of an open world game and is a very insightful individual when referring to students who have future dreams and goals want to accomplish after the last step into college. BioWare is full of surprises, and Christian Clark’s artistic compositing, throughout his history of designing weaponry, and small to large levels, is truly in the eye of the BioWare beholder.

©BioWare – Lighting by Christian Clark

Video Edited with:  DSLR Camera and Adobe Premiere Pro.

To view the rest of Christian Clark’s Artwork, click on:

https://www.artstation.com/mekhollandt

For the keyword research for “video games”: I chose ‘Can Video Games Make You Smarter?’

Top 5 Keywords:

1. Video Games make you smarter statistics

2. Do video games make you smarter 2018

3. Can Video Games make you smarter in school

4. Do video games make you dumber

5. Do video games make you violent

Legend:

Blue = Video Games Make Your Smarter

Red: Video Games and the Brain

Yellow: Video Games Cause Violence

Sources:

https://answerthepublic.com/reports/fd3847c9-24bd-4924-9f24-73c384aef7d3

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=video%20games%20make%20you%20smarter,video%20games%20brain,video%20games%20cause%20violence

PITCH ASSIGN2:
For this assignment, I may continue on with what I am doing with Electronic Arts, this time instead of doing a pitch around what they do surrounding social media, I will be taking a tour around the company and know what they are about in the video game industry. I will have to ask an EA employee for permission to enter the facility, write down questions for those who want to answer them, record film of the company, employees, if by permission, and will composite audio for perfect interviewing. DUE Nov. 5 @ 9:30a/MYSLIK/500-700/VIDEO/AUDIO

Everyone knows that in order for a product or brand to be successful, what else would increase its popularity than its marketing? It’s the one thing that keeps popular games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and the Pokémon franchise on the map. But it isn’t just the trailers, the advertisements, posters, or behind-the-scenes gameplay that goad the players into purchasing a full-price or a retail game, but mainly it has to do with the internet. Social media as a whole has one of the beneficial, astronomically important factors of how a product can exceed its reputation in the industry.

According to a 2014 article by Kayla Minguez of Social Media Today called “The Merging of Social Media and Gaming,” she states that video game marketing with word of mouth, but especially the handling of social media have been ‘[made] it even easier for opinions to be published quickly and have a global reach’ and online gamers can easily offer their insight on a video game by way of Twitter and Facebook posts. More importantly, ongoing and supportive gaming companies will listen and conversing to their fan bases “by shaping conversations [via] social media content”.

To figure out what goes on behind the scenes of a video game company’s way of spreading the word about and an upcoming release, I’ve been able to fortunately contact with a few supervisors and managers of one of the biggest names in the video game market, Electronic Arts (also known as EA as most people know it as), and interviewed them about their central perspective and process on how social media has created such a dynamic impact to their games and the company altogether.

Chin Pea, the Manager for Social Channels and Influencers of EA, offered some highlight information when asked why video games — such as the new release of Star Wars: Jedi – Fallen Order — rely on social media to advertise themselves for players. “We want to be where our communities are,” Pea said, “and frankly, as gamers, artist and fans ourselves, we enjoy how directly we can interact with everyone by providing up-to-the-minute updates, accurate information and highlights of things to come.”
Pea added that cultivating communities within social media in gaming is “more than promotion.” Pea informs that, “The Community team that handles all the social channels and forums, also support other gaming influencers by helping them grow their channels and more broadly, grow the community so it is a safe, inclusive space to share your passions.”

To unfold on other perspectives of how social media affects the video game industry, I turned over to Global Events Supervisor, Alexander Bowman for extended perspectives and details. When I asked how does marketing with the use of social media help a video game gain attention, he replied that they use different tools to gain attention and usually social media is used to attract the player and not the media in its entirety.

For example, there is a technique called ‘Producer Tours’ in which “[EA] travel throughout key territories (like several countries in Europe, a central location in Asia and then, depending on the game, in South and North America as well) where we have game play or other producers from our games explain the new features or what the game is to the actual video games media”. Bowman says that is also applies to mobile games as those types of games are using the same exact techniques on social media that other publishers use for marketing.

To conclude, I have made this valuable question that is, in fact, quite a difficult one to answer: I asked where would video games and their industries be without social media? In her final answer to the interview, Chia Pea said the following, “Video games did exist before social media — even before MySpace! People are social to some degree — even if we don’t call it “social media,” people will come together in a form or another to hang out and share their opinions. So really, as long as there’s communities of people who love gaming, and they want to hear from video game companies, then there will be video game marketing.”

To Read More on these Topic
Go To: https://mailchi.mp/24f8b6eae4e3/luke-nukems-nonsensical-newsletter

1. How does social media play a part in marketing for video games?
Social Media plays a part within gaming because it offers a wide range of gamers across the world to offer their own critical thoughts about the game they are playing whether it’s from blogs, Facebook posts, Tweets, and YouTube videos. According to TechMaish, games receive free advertisement as players share opinions, playthroughs (or “Let’s Plays”), and even strategies online.

2. Where would the Video Game Industry be without Social Media?
The video game industry wouldn’t become as relevant today without social media because wouldn’t open the door for the concepts of live-streaming and communities across the web. Medium described that the reason why video games have become more popular and mainstream, is because, for example, “the emergence of the Nintendo Wii and its motion controls,” shows that videos are a platform that everyone can play. YouTube, more importantly has further pushed this along to have enthusiasts to share their information and passion for games, not to mention that revenue streams has evolved from just sales to also include content creation by YouTubers.

3. What about Mobile Games? How are they handled by social media and advertising?
This also applies to Mobile Gaming just about as much as other gaming platforms. With mobile games, such as “Candy Crush” by King, they are innovating the marketing process by integrating their ways of advertising. According to AllBusiness, advertisements on social games have an average engagement of 20%, and Facebook brand pages for multimedia brands average 0.50%. Social Gaming Advertisements have a 91% completion rate, which is the highest of the industry.

SLUG: PITCHASSIGN1

For this online journalism new story, since an aspect of this feature has to do with social media in some sort of way, I have decided to write about how movies across the film industry use social media for advertising their films to their intended audience. I am going to do some digging into some of the ways that film studios use social media that dictate whether a movie is going to gain a lot of attention or be left in the dust. DUE Oct 1 @ 9:30a/Myslik/400-600 Words/PHOTOS/VIDEO (Maybe)

Recently, last week, there were two staff members that presented in the siminar and there was another that was apart of a video game creating company. The first that presented was a man named Bob Bryant, who as a kid, and teenager as well, was very invested in pinball machines, so much so that he wanted to bring the idea of pinball machines into video game consoles like Xbox and PC. The second were two of my Visual Studies professors, Alexandra Robinson and Joe Vitone. Dr. Robinson, showed multiple artistic photographs of her children and how important they are to her, and would also create GIFs that are a bit unique I would say. Dr. Vitone showed family records that dated back to 1998, first shooting in Costa Rica with photographs 4X5 of family members either in black and white photos and or color.

My response to this course is that it was very interesting seeing multiple artists and game designers show up to see what they are all about, and it would inspire multiple people to be much like them in the future. I don’t really have much to say accept that I really enjoyed going to this class.