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Pitch Video
A level 3 VFX students FMP
Pitch Video
A level 3 VFX students FMP
Primary Research
Surveys, e-mails and other stuff
FMP survey
Target audience and feedback
When deciding what research to do for my primary I figured that It would be extremely helpful to know my target audience as this is a thing that I failed to rely delve into with my pitch, I thought the best way to collect information regarding that as well as what they would want from my content and also to see if they watch similar programs or shows like history documentary's on YouTube was through a survey.
The results from my survey will be invaluable in helping shape my project into content that will be appealing and easily consumable, as this is one of my main goals.
Target audience
The First and second questions of my survey both relate to target audience, by knowing this I can make decisions on who to gear the project towards. In terms of Age I had quite a broad selection, this was to be expected as I know for a fact people from all age groups enjoy history, the range was from 11 to 79, this gives me quite the range of generations to pull from, so if most of the responses to my later questions are positive I can be sure the mini-doc will appeal to everyone.
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Thinking about it now there are a number of ways I could of streamlined my questionnaire witch seem pretty obvious now, in the age category making it single choice with ranges e.g. 10-17 18-30 etc. and in the gender category just male and female, this would of helped to make the visualisations of the answers a little more clearer.
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Moving on to age range, I had 75% male apposed to the 25% female, again this was honestly to be expected, as when looking at the next question which asks if the respondent likes or watches any kind of history documentary, the broad answer from that was 55% yes to 45% no when looking at the specific responses to though 9 men said they did whilst 6 didn't, where as 2 women said they did whilst 3 didn't, this shows that with the sample size considered the majority of men liked documentaries whereas the majority of women didn't.
When Looking at the next question, are you a fan of medieval history? the answers change a bit its now 70% yes with 30% no this equates with 12 men saying they do and 3 saying they don't, with 2 women saying they do and 3 saying they don't, curiously the same 3 women who said they don't watch docs also don't like medieval history, this is a pretty obvious way to see that they aren't exactly my target audience. conversely 4 of the men who don't watch documentaries did say they were a fan of medieval history, this shows that they could defiantly be interested in the subject matter so this could be a way to get them more interested in this kind of content witch is defiantly something I've set out to as one of my goals.
Opinions and recommendations
On these types of questions I got a lot more responses than I ever thought I would, I added this question into my survey to get a general feel for what kind of content my audience likes and If I can draw any inspiration from it.
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two titles/themes that popped up a few times were Abandoned engineering and anything to do with world war 2, the latter is obviously a huge part of modern history and the subject of many documentaries, I'm not entirely sure I can really pull much inspiration from the specific ones mentioned: World war 2 in colour, Nazi superstructures or YouTube channels like The Great War.
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They are all huge team projects usually bankrolled by streaming services or a TV company, the scope of there projects are much greater then mine, they also have episodic formats so they can take the time to go into the minutia of detail on any number of topics whereas I simply can't.
The long list of youtubers mentioned in one answer actually lists a number of channels that I personally watch Kings and Generals being one that inspired me to start this project, Linfamy is another channel that I like quite a lot, Its mainly focused on Japanese history and culture, the animated videos he produces whilst being relatively simplistic in appetence, house a great deal of information. he goes pretty in-depth in whatever subject he's talking about and that's defiantly something I would like to emulate.
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As for the question does this project appeal to you I got a overwhelmingly positive answer, this could be because everyone genuinely liked the idea, or it could just be them being nice. Whatever the case may be I'm hopeful that other people who may not be huge history fans may be interested in the concept as much as the people who completed my survey were.
It gives me confidence that all my research and planning hasn't been for naught as it does seem like there's a substantial audience of people who whilst not being history buffs will still more that happily consume content about a particular event in history that peaks there interest, and in my opinion the Mongol invasions were some of the most interesting events in far east history.
This is one of Linfamys videos, actually I think it was the first one I watched, It was a collaboration between him and the Shogunate another channel I'll talk more about shortly. They talk about a multitude of legends to do with the samurai, Linfamy strikes a great balance in his content, between light-hearted comedy whilst being quite informative.
I'm not sure this is the kind of direction I want my project to go in but its important to consider the fact that some people may be turned off by a overly serious tone.
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[To actually see the answers from the follow-up question I recommend going back up to the top of this page and looking at the spreadsheet I created, because some of the answers are quite long]
When I made the survey I thought it would be a good idea to base some questions off of the some of the content presented in my FMP pitch PowerPoint, I linked it at the top of the survey and told people to look through it otherwise some of the questions wouldn't make sense.
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to start I'm happy to see that the people liked the content presented as examples of what ill try to achieve, this again reinforces the fact that people will more than likely enjoy my video whatever relation they have to being a fan of history.
Now on to the more interesting question about what specifically they liked or disliked about the styles or designs of the content;
A lot of people seemed to like the simplicity of the style of kings and generals as it was easy to follow and presented the battle clearly, the commentary/narration was also a thing people mentioned as being clear and concise, this helped to present the facts well and kept the audience engaged.
One person commented on the sound/music being poorly timed Quote: 'Dislike Badly timed music/Sound which is a common trend in this style of video for some reason.' I can say that from being a fan of this content myself some of the sounds and music can be too loud and like they said poorly timed, this is a big issue that is defiantly important to the success of my project.
When it comes to my production I will make sure my music flows with my narration, I will do this by carefully selecting my music tracks to ensure they aren't overly loud or distracting from my voice over, to this end I've set aside time to test certain tracks with a voice over in my experimental practical section, hopefully with practise beforehand I wont make the same mistake as some of the other creators.
Another dislike someone else had was to do with the 2nd videos choice of colours as well as the difficulty to read: 'I disliked that the 2nd video shown was so dark and that the writing was quite hard to read.', I don't think this will be a problem for me as the style I'm aiming for has a bright and vibrant colour pallet much like the artwork of the time and less of a grungy washed out look that the KAG video seems to go for.
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This is the video that was refed to as being dark
In terms of what level of depth people wanted to see in my project go into was pretty heavily skewed towards the more in-depth side, this is relating to the build up, causes and aftermath of the war, witch is one of the main reasons that I really enjoy this topic, as I've gone over in my contextual thinking tab the affects of the invasion, on the Japanese way of war were many and most of the leading causes for the Sengoku Jidai can be in some way or other be linked back to the Mongols.
The amount of depth I can go into in the video directly corelates to how much time I actually have to talk about the subject, this is what the question seeks to answer, I told the recipients that I had around 6 weeks to make and document the whole project and with all the information about what it was going to look like and the content that would be presented I asked them how long they think the video should be, the result was pretty clear with 50% saying it should be 10mins with 15 saying 12 and 35 thinking it should be just 7.
Overall I can agree with the 50% as I think 9-10 mutinies is a good spot to aim for as if its any longer i'd say it risks the audience getting bored, whereas if its any shorter I may not be able to cover all the information I would want to leaving the supposed information filled documentary being overly brief and kind of poitless.
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Music and recommendations
Its good to see the samples of music I provided in my Project proposal were received positively, I feel the Shogun 2 total war original soundtrack is a perfect fit for my project in terms of musical score, the ost has a great selection of both calm and busy pieces witch I definably need for both the battle scenes and for when I or someone else will be narrating, all that goes the same for Ghost of Tsushima a game actually inspired by the Mongol invasions of Japan.
On the other side I asked for recommendations for music from other sources to diversify the existing list of songs, I got a few joke answers but some of them were pretty good suggestions: Sekiro and for Honour are both other videogames and both have relatively good Asian inspired soundtracks, Sekiro stands out in this especially with 'Sekiro, The One-armed Wolf' and 'Approaching Forces' being good intro and battle music respectively.
For honour has some okay Japanese flute themed music sections of all listed below would be great for both combat and narration due to the up and down nature of all of the tracks this gives me a bunch of options to vary the themes of the background music throughout.
The long answer you can't read off of the picture above talks about the Nobunaga's ambition series of videogames as well as scores from classical Japanese cinema from films like Seven Samurai or Yojimbo by Achira Kurosawa. I checked out the Nobunaga's ambition: sphere of influence soundtrack and listened to it whilst I was working and honestly I don't think its what I'm looking for with the more serious tone that the project is planned to have, it all sounds a little too studio Ghibli, that is orchestral, upbeat and grand, not particularly what I'm looking for, a good example of this is the track 'moral boost', its very aloof and would probably slot right into Princess Mononoke, some of it also just sounds a little bit too anime for my tastes. (however the track creeping darkness might be a good more subtle kind of battle music I can use, it features drums so it would be good for the Mongol aspect.)
As for classical Japanese cinema the soundtrack of Seven samurai is Iconic and I do love it but it suffers a similar problem to Nobunaga's ambition in that its a little to upbeat and more of a specific film score than traditional Japanese or Asian inspired music, Another thing that stops me from really considering films scores like seven samurais is the fact that the quality of audio isn't particularly good as the movie came out in 1954 and reuploads of the music aren't much better, I just feel it would be too jarring to include, going from music from a 2019 game to a film score that came out over 6 decades before it might not be a good idea.
All in all I've had some really good suggestions from the people who filled out my survey and I'm happy I've got a bunch more music to consider adding to my playlist for the project, if you wish you will be able to access the entire thing via YouTube on my Planning and pre production Tab, as I've stressed multiple times music is a really important part of the project so im pleased to have a good few back up options if one score I've chosen doesn't pan out for some reason.
Contacting Youtubers
Script writing and how to make maps
The Shogunate
The First content creator I contacted was the Shogunate a YouTube channel based on samurai warfare culture and history with over 70k subscribers, his channel is responsible for getting me fully interested in the samurai and is obviously related to my project as the history of the samurai was heavily effected by the contact with the Mongols and Asian mainland.
although as mentioned in the email his channel does focuses a lot more on the history of the specific period from 1467 to 1615 named the Sengoku jidai or age of warring states, I don't think this matters at all in the context of research and scripting witch is the main reason I am contacting him.
I'm certainly exited to see if he responds as I do really love his work and its been a great inspiration for me, so I hope he can give me some tips about structuring videos, as id say that's the best way to make your content easy to consume for a possibly younger target audience, whilst still being coherent, because that's a big thing I'm really hoping I get right.
The Response
First off I'm absolutely thrilled to have received a response to my e-mail, but praise of my pitch PowerPoint was completely unexpected its defiantly good to hear that the idea for the project resonated with him.
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The amount of detail he went into about explaining both his process as well as a few sources he uses to gather information for his projects really inspired me to more deeply consider the research I was doing and If I thought it was actually helpful to the project.
He advised me to in his words '(his sources) read through them again to get a better understanding before putting it all into my own words in a script' When beginning the scripting and planning process I will endeavour to constantly look back upon my sources to make sure my content will be as historically accurate as I can make it as well as being streamlined enough to keep the retention of the audience high as both are goals of for me when creating this content.
When he starts to talk about some of the sources he uses the first he mentioned is a line of books from the compony Osprey publishing and as you can see in my response email I said that I already own the book and have used it many times in the secondary research portion of this website.
The specific book he's referencing is 'the Mongol invasions of Japan 1274 and 1281' by Stephan Turnbull, I've used it as a source for many images and just general historical overview as its an amazing book that covers the entire duration of the invasions and features many quotes from translated historical texts from both the Yuan and the Japanese.
The second source he provides is the Japanese wiki corpus, I hadn't heard about this specific website but there article on the Genko goes into excruciating detail in all aspects of the invasion, over 6 thousand words covering all the major and minor players, from the deputy shogun Tokimune to some of the envoys sent in negotiations with Japan.
I feel this will be extremely helpful as Nick said I shouldn't get too focused on just the overarching conflict and take time to properly research and flesh out the characters that play key roles in the story I will be telling, he says this would be a great way to: 'better flesh out the story of the conflict overall'.
I will be sure to use this page as well as other articles I can find to supplement and improve my research in all of the areas I can, to this end I've indevoured to have a good mix when it comes to my secondary tab, when looking at the defences of Tsushima and Iki I don't just focus on the battles and how they were fort but the characters that are important and add depth to the story; SÅ Sukekuni and Sukisada are two such characters that I plan to focus on. I like to think this will elevate my content from just a impersonal showcase of war, to a more personal and relatable story of defiance against invaders to protect your homeland.
Kings and generals
(and related creators)
The Second content creator I contacted was Kings and Generals another history YouTube channel, I again did this via the email listed on the YouTube account, to no response as of writing. KAG as ill abbreviate it to, mainly focus on animated historical documentaries much like the one I'm going to be making, They cover a wide range of conflicts and battles, with a animation style that I really enjoy and wish to emulate to some degree, this is the main reason I wish to contact them, I wanted to find out how they go about obtaining the map information as like I said in the email its a pretty big part of the project.
as of current they have just over 1.77 million subscribers defiantly a large step up from 70k, the actual channel is more of a company as unlike the Shogunate the videos aren't made by just one person, this allows the quality of the content to be much higher. Looking on there website there isn't really an about section so I checked under one of there videos I was using for reference and it lists the people who worked in this video, the script was written by one, preformed by another and someone else edited the video together, presumably also made the maps and troop blocks.
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Finding maps of the battle sites for a conflict that long ago is going to be pretty hard, as there isn't many written let alone drawn sources of information to pull from, This comes up in the Secondary research tab as when talking about the battle of Komoda beach and how I can barely find modern images of it, This is the main reason I decided to contact them, to see if they simply made up the map of the beach as they couldn't find any good sources.
Other Creators
As previously mentioned there were a number of people listed in the description of the video by Kings and Generals that were credited with preforming and writing the script but the first line stuck out to me 'the video was created by our friend Arb Paninken', with a link to his art station account.
I decided to see if I could find him on social media to ask if he had any tips on creating any of the assets used in the videos.
From his twitter its clear he still helps with Kings and generals videos quite a bit as its plastered all over his feed.
Update
Unfortunately much like Kings and Generals I didn't receive a response from Arb, its a shame as I think he could of lended some insight on how to quickly and effectively make troop blocks in the style of kings and generals.
Researching voice actors
Where would I find them?
Where did I look?
The first place I decided to look was Fiverr as there adverts have been plaguing YouTube for a good while now, regardless of that they seem to have a wide range of VAs to choose from.
In the conceptual stage of the FMP I talked briefly about how I was thinking about getting someone else to do the voice acting for me as from previous projects the vocals have always been something I'm never happy with.
I feel like commissioning someone for VA would help my project out a good deal, It would give my project a greater sense of professionalism and make the overall personation much cleaner. There are a number of things to consider when looking for a VA the main factor for me would be price, as if my project is going to be 10-12 minuets long that's 10-12 minuets of narration.
A work around I have thought of is getting quotes from historical texts or certain short snippets professionally voice acted instead. This means that I don't have to pay a fortune whilst still getting some of the quality that I would like to have in a project that is as important as the Final major.
one example of this I could work into the video would be the regent shogun Hojo Tokimune when hearing about the invasion saying: "Finally there is the greatest event of my life." and when asked how he would respond he shrieked "Katsu!" (literally meaning "Victory!")
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Luckily I have the software as well as the hardware to do the narration to a passable degree if it comes to it. If I did get someone to VA for me I would have more time to be focused on the actual creation of the animations and editing overall, this could mean I have leave to possibly try something a lot more out there and harder to do as id have much more time.
What kind of voice?
Overall Voice acting
The kind of voice I'm looking for is a sort old/middle aged David Attenborough sort of voice, a historian or someone who sounds like they are a expert in the field and can speak with authority, whilst not sounding aggressive.
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Specific Voice acting
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For voice acting in terms of Hojo Tokimune I would want adult preferably Japanese man or atleas someone who can do a decent ascent, as Tokimune was about 20 at the time of the first invasion when the aforementioned quote was recorded.
Who id love to do it
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One stellar voice actor I came across whilst searching is britishvoiceart, after listening to the 4rd video in the examples of his work I was deadset on having him voice my project, his voice was exactly what I envisioned when voice acting was first proposed to me, sadly though I don't have £270 to spend on voice acting, I don't doubt it would be entirely worth it but its just not something I can do right now.
This means that as most other VAs charge similarly for 1500 words I'm most likely going to have to do the majority of the narrating for the project.
Researching Historical artwork
The space between battle
This will be a majorly important part of my video as it is probably going to be around 40 to 50 % of the video content, I want the images to be relevant to whatever I'm talking about so ill have to have a loose script worked out in my head as I think of what images I need: battles, weapons, armor, people, places, portraits and lots more.
I need to find certain pieces of artwork or modern recreations of said artwork to fit whatever I'm talking about in that specific scene, when I eventually write the script I will be splitting it into separate parts to allow myself to more easily plan out what will be visible and when, this means I can target specific images I want to find, but until then I'm just going to source certain bits of art I will almost defiantly be using.
The Ukiyo-e
The majority of visual evidence from ancient Japan comes in the form of woodblock prints called Ukiyo-e, but even then they are paintings so many tend to be romanticizations of historical events. they were an artform that flourished from the 17th to 19th centauries depicting all manner of things, from portraits to battles to landscapes, above you can see two for very different time periods one from the early 18th century and another clearly more modern from the late 19th century.
Arguably the most famous of the Ukiyo-e style paintings is 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' by Hokusai.
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I plan to use art much like this to represent the Tsunami when it appears in hakata bay, as I think this artwork perfectly suites this usage.
It is important to note that The Great Wave wasn't a Tsunami although many people do think that, It was determined that it was most likely a 'rouge wave', just a very big wave.
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Modern Recreations
It's been pretty well established I like the game Total war Shogun 2, its been plastered all-over my FMP website from my pitch to the experimental practical, so from the start I was pretty dead set on using the art from the game in my project.
Whilst reverse image searching for the name of the picture I am using for the background of my website I came across a link to the profile page of one Roland MacDonald an illustrator, It turns out he was the Art director on shogun 2 and had a hand in creating most of the stunning art and ui designs. on his page there is a collection of many of the battle scenes and other artworks I wish to use for filler in my project.
Takezaki Suenaga's Scrolls
Takezaki Suenaga was a warrior present in both battles at hakata and subsequently fort in both Mongol invasions, as warriors are rewarded for acts of valour and skill on the battlefield by the shogun he had a scroll commissioned to document his acts during the fighting.
This gives us an unparalleled glimpse into the kind of fighting as well as what Armor and weapons were being used.
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This website I found through looking for coloured and better quality images of the invasion, is an absolute treasure trove.
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The amount of art presented on the site is quite frankly astounding, I can save an image from almost any part of the scroll, this will be a massive help in obtaining background pictures to animate.
Other Specific pieces
This specific picture shows two samurai with a dead Mongol soldier at there feet, It has been theorised that this is suppose to be So Sukekuni the shugo of Tsushima.
It is currently held in the Komodahama Shrine on Tsushima Island, I'm defiantly going to use this image when talking about the landings there, I may also use it as the character troop block for Sukekuni.
Commissioning artwork
From me family
I was talking to my auntie about how college was going and she suggested she could draw me something for it, we settled on a Mongol invasion ship.
Below is the finished article.
I plan to import it into illustrator for use as either an asset in the visuals of the Mongol ships arriving in hakata/Tsushima, with smoke and fog and a sea underneath, or for use in the thumbnail.
