Countdown to King: An Introduction

I am relatively new to Interactive Multimedia. I only officially transferred into the major last year, and when I came in I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had multiple careers I was interested in pursuing: music production, video editing, and game design. However, I wasn’t taking into account an important detail: I am heavily involved with TCNJ’s gaming club, Lions Gaming.

Since my freshman year, I have been a part of the Super Smash Bros. community at TCNJ, not only as a player but as a content producer. I was a member of Lions Gaming’s executive board during the 2018–2019 school year as its historian and Twitter manager, and I joined its Production Committee this year as a video editor. I have created graphics and YouTube thumbnails for our Smash tournaments:

I have also edited the videos for our community’s power rankings since 2017:

Originally, my thesis project was going to be something that I have never come close to attempting before: a rhythm game made in Unity. I had never even touched Unity before, and I was taking Games I that semester, meaning that I would be relying on game design knowledge that I would learn as I went. I eventually realized that idea was incredibly stupid, and I finally decided that I should make a project that accurately represents my passions and what I would like to do as a career, and was more ambitious than anything I had ever done. I would make a documentary.

Countdown to King aims to be a multi-part series that follows some of TCNJ’s best Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players across the Spring 2020 semester, as they prepare for the next installment of Lions Gaming’s yearly tournament series, King.

I will be learning skills that I have not yet put to use in any of my videos: filming and cinematography, and motion graphics. While already a challenge for me, this will be made even more challenging by the fact that I have to capture all of the exciting moments that happen over the semester. None of this will be scripted, aside from some introductory interviews.

For my IMM After Dark presentation, I have created three examples of how I plan to present this video: a rough edit of footage from Scarlet Smackdown 3, where TCNJ’s Smash Ultimate team competed against Drexel University’s A team; a “VS” screen that will display before every match; and a live counter that displays and updates the score of each match. The final edit of the footage will serve as an introduction or prelude to the final video series.

I have been passionate about the Smash community at TCNJ for nearly four years, and I have always wanted to create a project that highlights how tight-knit and exciting it is. I hope that with this documentary, I can accomplish those goals as well as show the video editing skills I have been honing throughout my years at TCNJ.