DWARF – One Friday Night

The assignment brief was to find out about a community you do not know much about, get to know them and tell their story.

 Planning:

I chose to tell the story of the local gaming club – DWARF (Dunfermline Wargaming and Roleplaying Fellowship). They meet every Friday night and occasionally at weekends especially during the school holidays. The group has up to 510 members but there is a fairly constant cohort of about 50 people who attend most activities. They also run larger meetings twice a year to link with other groups across Scotland.

The club consists of three sections:

• Wargaming
• Role playing
• Tabletop games

Most people are consistent members of one group, but they may also engage in other activities from time to time.

My initial thoughts and processes are shown here:  Assignment 3 – Starting point

Research:

I did a large amount of reading around the subject of telling stories and looked at several books and online series to consider how other people have put their work together. The main thing I learnt was that there are as many ways of telling stories as there are story tellers, but the most important ones are a real interest in the story you are telling, an emotional engagement and some form of internal consistency. This consistency can be in the colour (or lack of), the format or the tonal values – or simply in the underlying feeling of the piece of work.

For details of the research see: Research for Assignment 3

Process:

• The club was keen to engage with me and very welcoming. I attended 6 sections and was planning to attend more but this was cut short by the corona virus. I spent time chatting with the people and learning about the various games they play. I had been in a role-playing club many years ago and two of my children also play so I had some initial insight into the activities.
• I took images (lots) of all the activities, eventually using flash because of the difficulties with light. I had hoped to avoid it because it can be intrusive – but nobody seemed to mind.
• I then cut these images down into sections to try and tell the story.

The details of my thinking around the story telling and choosing images can be seen here:  Assignment 3 – Choices

Final choices:

The main consideration was how best to tell the story. I had a lot of usable images – but there is a lot happening at each meeting. I considered only telling part of the story – concentrating on only one part of the activity going on, but I was reluctant to do that, partly simply because it does not give the true picture of the club, and partly because the whole membership had given me their time. I also considered focusing on the portrait images I had taken. Again, this only tells part of the story although they are a very interesting group of people and clearly enjoyed having their pictures taken.

The final images chosen tell the story of what happens on a Friday night, with some about the games, some details of the activities and some about the individual people.

Images:

For PowerPoint see:

DWARF

With thanks to all the members of DWARF