So. Here's the chronicling of the journey that my documentary took/will take. Past tense or present? That's an interesting conundrum. Moving on.
So, for those who don't know what tabletop gaming is, it's basically anything you play on a table. Board games, card games, war gaming, etc etc. All those count. Look at you, being a tabletop gamer while ruining your family by playing Monopoly! No, I don't care if it's the Game of Thrones version or not, it's not entertaining, it's just stressful.
Moving on.
The initial premise of this documentary has been to document how people in Brisbane got into tabletop gaming. This soon turned out to be, well, difficult. Not even because people have different reasons and ways they got into it, but because a better angle was found, which was how people decided that running tabletop stores was a viable business model.
Now, research into tabletop gaming in Brisbane didn't lead to much that I didn't already know, besides the notion of BrisCon, which is neat but not quite what we were looking for. Looking specifically into the tabletop stores led to a few that were new to me but were quite inconvenient to get to, either their distance away from where we were located meant that it would be nearly impossible to get there without personal transportation, which isn't something that was possible for some of the crew, or they were just in places too confined to do anything that wouldn't completely interfere with the business while it was operating, see MindGames in the Brisbane CBD for that situation.
From prior knowledge, I knew about a place called Vault Games in the city, which had a nice out of the way area and was a good place to film because one of the owners used to study at my university.
After the interview of Dylan at Vault Games, we noted that he was basically being a walking commercial for the store and while that's something that isn't bad if we were trying to make a commercial for them, we weren't so it became an issue, and thus began the search again.
After the interview of Dylan at Vault Games, we noted that he was basically being a walking commercial for the store and while that's something that isn't bad if we were trying to make a commercial for them, we weren't so it became an issue, and thus began the search again.
Finding a second location proved to be difficult as many places didn't return attempts to communicate with them, however one place in South Bank, the Dark Magician, which found by pure luck, was more than willing to cooperate with the production on short notice.
UPDATE:
Outside of that, the project proved to continuously change and alter itself as we developed the situation. From continued shooting days to overall levels of morale getting low, as well as my own life situation, it was rough to get through to the end. Figuring out what was going to happen with the structure as well as what we were or were not going to show and how it was going to play out in the edit was stressful and ultimately led to some completely ridiculous complications for the end product, including the back and forth of screening submissions.
