Before saying anything, a disclaimer – this idea is inspired by/a rip off of photographer Robbie Cooper’s Immersion that did the rounds on the blogosphere a few weeks ago.  Robbie’s work is far more involved, well researched, and polished than what you see here; me and a few guys at work having some fun and trying to figure out how to pull the trick of playing games into a tele-prompter off.  Robbie’s video is part of a larger study into human interactions.  We’re just trying to figure out a way to get some cool footage for use on the video games website we make video for.  Go check out Robbie’s blog - he’s very active on the comments on his posts and it’s been a pleasure reading his interactions with people.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, this was a lot of fun to make.  It’s taken us a couple of week’s head scratching to figure out an easy way to use a tele-prompter to capture this kind of footage.  The main sticking point was how to reverse the output of the monitor so that the game being played would be the right way round once it’d bounced off the mirrored surface of the tele-prompter.  Over the weekend, work mate Drew Stearne had a eureka moment and figured it all out, and today we put it all together and did some filming.

We were all really happy with the results – it’s a little rough round the edges (the audio is all on-camera mic, the picture is a bit wonky and the lighting isn’t quite right), but nothing that can’t be cleaned up.

Having captured the footage and started going through it, what was apparent straight away was how completely natural the expressions and mannerisms of the people being filmed are.  The distraction of playing the game seems to completely override any awareness of the recording camera.  Intimate footage that is usually so hard to get is present in virtually every frame.  The other obvious thing that makes this so much fun is the little facial twitches that people exhibit, seemingly unique to each person.  I seem to have a habit of rapidly pursing my lips, while Ash is prone to minute puffs of the cheek.  Guy is a games journalist, which might go some way to explaining his mono-expressioned poker face, cracking a satisfied grin only when victory was assured.

Now we need to figure out a way to use this technique in our fortnightly video games show – any ideas are welcome!