Author: TVPaulD
TVBRO Week 2 1/10/12-7/10/12
We held our second meeting this week and decided to go ahead with our plan to film at one of the University’s Preview Days, to look at how the Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries promotes itself on these more general open days, having been informed of its date after our previous meeting. It lined up well with our show, since the Preview Day was held on the Saturday immediately before, meaning the information would be fresh & we would have the first few days of the week of the show to edit the Insert together.
At this meeting e began to think about presenters in more detail. I was lined up as one, Jo Walker as another and we decided to use Natalie Wilsher (One of the show’s veteran presenters) as our newscaster.
It emerged this week that we were having difficulty getting ahold of Mark Sexton to arrange the interview about Computing & Digital Sound, after we initially reached out to him and received a positive reception his schedule became busier and as a result we weren’t able to arrange a date & time for the interview during the week. We hope to rectify this problem by shooting the interview early next week and starting the edit immediately after it is shot.
With regards to the editing, I noted that the required workflow for CCi Live inserts was slightly more complicated than previous workflows that we had used, since it involved strict offline and online requirements and mandated very specific final export requirements. As a result, I decided it was important that everyone who was going to be involved in the editing process get up to speed on it, which I communicated to them prior to the shoot on saturday.
Between times, I prepared the necessary paperwork for the team filming on Saturday – the release forms, risk assessment, call sheet etc., arranged with the director and his crew when and where to meet etc. and instructed them about the sorts of things they needed to film on the day.
Today (Sunday), I wrote the first draft of the script for the show. I wanted to give the show an appropriately light-hearted tone, so I made sure to include a number of jokes throughout the script to keep the general mood and tone of the show light, without descending into farce. It’s important the jokes not be offensive or even exclusionary. The idea is to make the presenters approachable and likeable, and make the audience feel included in what’s going on.
Similarly, I was careful to make sure that the presenters spent about as much time in the script directly addressing the audience as they did each other. This makes the audience feel they are part of whatever is happening on screen, rather than just watching two people talk, which is important as the audience is the most important consideration for any television show.
CCi Live 05/10/2012
CCi week 2, another action packed episode where we explore placements, how to save a bit of money and a live performance! Featuring me as a Presenter for the first time on CCi Live.
Building The Olympics
The videos produced by Distinct Productions, as part of the University of Portsmouth’s Television & Broadcasting Course for the Module “Video Industry & Television Studies”. Production Credit goes to Daniel Schultz, Reanne Bull, Ellen Sharkey, Lewis Avarillo-Singh & Paul Douglas, who were executive produced by Charlie Watts and Lou Appleby (Within the University) and Dave Batcock from the BBC. This project was created for and screened as part of the BBC Big Screen Project.
TVBRO Week 1 24/9/12-30/9/12
In our first meeting on Thursday, we began to plan the basics of how we’re going to put our first episode of CCi Live together. I was nominated to be the producer, so I set about organising our various ideas for content. One of the first ideas we had was to look at the open days around the Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries, but since we don’t yet know when these would be taking place, we shelved the idea for the time being.
Since I know some Students from other Schools & course within the faculty, I suggested a showcase of work from photography or architecture Students (For example). We agreed this would be one of our inserts since it would appeal to a relatively broad section of the CCi Channel audience and I volunteered to get in touch with my contacts to see if the had anything they’d be interested in showcasing.
Our other insert idea is to interview Mark Sexton, the leader of a new course at the Faculty – BSc (Hons) Computing & Digital Sound -about the course, as a way of promoting it and introducing it to the rest of the Faculty’s students.
I also requested to be one of the show’s two presenters as I have experience presenting and am aiming to develop in this role, since it is my chosen career path. I am also presenting on the CCi Live immediately before ours, airing on the 5th of October.
Review: The Revolution Will Be Televised
A few years ago, I happened upon a little show on the BBC iPlayer when I was bored. That show was called “The Chaser’s War on Everything”. If you’ve never seen it, The Chaser’s War is a stunt and sketch comedy series by an Australian comedy toupee. They skewer the modern world – entertainment, politics and so on. It’s a great show and Australia’s National Broadcaster (The OTHER ABC) is rightly proud of The Chaser’s work. The BBC showed it here in the UK and I can only imagine they did so with envious eyes, because BBC Three’s latest comedy show “The Revolution Will Be Televised” is a fairly direct clone.
BBC Three, which bills itself as “Never Afraid to Try New Things” has a recent history of trotting out all-new comedy series. Some of these are frankly brilliant, like the puppet-based adult sitcom “Mongrels”. Unfortunately, they cancelled that show. Others among these BBC Three Comedy experiments are less funny. Like everything they have done involving Russell Kane – a man whose comedy I have yet to find a single person admitting to enjoying.
Unfortunately, “The Revolution Will Be Televised” appears to have come from the same BBC Three programmers who cancelled “Mongrels” and have been pushing Russell Kane harder than a Sixth Form Tutor pushes University applications and not from the people responsible for putting shows like “Mongrels”, “Bad Education” and “Wilfred” on BBC Three’s airtime. Because it’s painfully flawed.
PAINFULLY flawed.
Of course it’s entirely possible that all these shows were picked up by the same programmers. In which case I would definitely have to characterise their efforts as “hit or miss”. Speaking of which…
That’s basically the biggest problem with “The Revolution Will Be Televised”, at least as far as the first episode indicates. Too many of the stunts fall flat in their efforts to be funny. Actually, that’s not entirely it…
More accurately, almost all the stunts have some good ideas and funny bits in them (The exceptions from Episode 1 wold be the MI6 stunt – which was just utterly moronic from the moment it started to the moment it mercifully ended – and the Occupy Protests stunt – which took a good idea for a stunt and wasted it by having an unfunny halfwit try and do what “The Daily Show” correspondents have been doing successfully for years and failing miserably). The problem is…These guys just don’t seem to know when they’ve got the laugh.
Jon Stewart with some of The Daily Show’s Correspondents
Once you’ve got the laugh, you stop. And you move on. To keep things fresh. Here, our would-be revolutionaries continue labouring the point well past the time the shock value wears off. The Chaser never did that. If the laugh came earlier than they were expecting, they simply escalated. That kept things fresh and replaced the shock value with refuge in audacity.
The Chaser
What’s worse though, is that most of these bits were repeated. Oh yes, not content to outstay their welcome alone, several of the episode’s stunts were broken up into chunks. Meaning that we were treated to a re-tread of the same joke later in the episode – a joke which had already been overused before the re-tread even started. Frustrating to say the least.
https://twitter.com/TVPaulD/status/238396058802221057There’s something funny to be done with the ideas behind “The Revolution Will Be Televised”, but I’m not entirely confident that Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein are the right people to execute on it- at least, not on their own. I feel like with more than just the two creators putting stunts together and carrying them out, the’d be able to cover more ground. That’d really help a lot.
Still, maybe things will pick up with the later episodes. It happened for Ten O’Clock Live Season 2 after all.
Disneyland Paris Summer 2010
All the videos from our trip to Disneyland Paris in late July/early
August 2010.
Lighthouse Landscape
Another Paper by fiftythree creation, this time a landscape featuring a lighthouse
The Counter Culture Podcast E3 Day Zero
Counter Culture returns for its annual E3 Special as your hosts Paul Douglas and Tom Kline take on Day Zero of E3 2012! Listen on Spreaker
Drinks to Beverages: Alibi Pretox
This time on Drinks to Beverages, it’s Alibi Pretox Drink. What is Pretox? It’s a made up goddamned nonsense word. Still, is Alibi worth checking out? Watch and find out!
TVPaulD.com 