Jim Devereaux chronicles a day in the life of two bored gamers

A day in the life

If you, the avid gamer, were asked to describe a day you dedicated entirely to games, I imagine whatever description you provided would be a pretty relaxed one.

Apart from the odd frustration where the luck didn’t go your way, by and large it probably involved lying around on a sofa and having a chilled out time.
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When it came to our very first filming day for Bored Gamers, however, a day entirely dedicated to games, the reality could not have been more different.

Up at 6am, no sooner had my frazzled not-yet-awake head gone over all the boxes full of tech delights clogging my hallway, Greg arrived, and together we loaded my car with kit as well as three chairs, coffee table, laptop, iPad, USB stick, and the only copy of the new game we were going to feature (an essential item!).

We arrived at the studio at 7.15am to load in and start setting up our set. On the physical side, this involved me constructing the chairs and coffee table and setting them in the right place as well as plugging in and firing up all the console games paraphernalia where it would be just out of shot, but close enough still to play.

We loaded my car with kit, three chairs, coffee table, laptop, iPad …

Meanwhile, on the virtual side, Greg tackled loading all of our graphics, idents, logos, music and videos into the virtual set software whilst making sure he matched up all the visual assets so our stage wouldn’t look messy and disjointed when we started filming.

By the time we finished this work it was 8.30am. Unfortunately we couldn’t start recording due to the PlayStation 4 not talking to the virtual set and an autocue problem making my text dark purple on black, therefore illegible. By the time we did shoot, we were several hours behind, and having to wait an extra two hours to get the raw footage onto USB and back to my flat to edit. With all the niggling delays caused by rendering, exporting and having to set every segment at exactly 11 minutes, we finally got the show finished at 2.30am.

Up again the next day at 7am, we checked our outputted final product, rushed it down to the studio, converted it for broadcast and breathed a huge sigh of relief. And the crazy-fun but stressful madness starts all over again next Thursday. Oh, to be a gamer!

Bored Gamers is an hour-long weekly show on all things gaming. Tune in to see it on Latest TV at 9pm every Friday night.