Thursday 18th March

This morning was another chance for me to get involved on the studio floor. I was first sent to help out with the camera crew and the lovely Scott, who showed me what I needed to know. I looked at various cameras including the steady cam. Because Deal or no deal is an original game, the eye line of each person on the camera has to be the same. He pointed out what the director can see, and how each camera covers a certain spot on the studio floor. I then helped out with the runners again, because the schedule was running on time it gave me the chance to interview the head runner, as I thought his journey through the media industry was quite interesting. Towards the end of the day I was with a familiar face again, the vision mixer Dan. As I was shadowing Dan he gave me the feedback from the director and the banker, i’m not allowed to say anything else about the banker but shadowing Dan was the highlight of my week.

Wednesday 17th March 2010

Finding my way round the site was a lot easier on Wednesday. I almost felt like part of the crew. My first mission was to find the gallery as I started the day shadowing the lighting crew. I bumped into Kevin Sharp, who also assisted us with the lighting for our multi cam music shoots back in Feb. He went through the basics, how to control, alter and direct the lights on cue to the show. I then watched them in action s the first recording began. As the director was close by I decided to ask him a few questions myself and ended up sitting with him for the second show. He briefly went through how he controlled the cameras and explained how it’s all about creating a story within the show, by using just the cameras. He was also attached to the mixing desk. After lunch I was back on the studio floor helping and shadowing the Floor Manager, Greg. As the show was recording he explained everything they did, it was certainly a lot faster paced! He also gave a prep talk to the contestants before they went into the studio, possibly my favourite task of the day.

Tuesday 16th March 2010

Tuesday schedule was different from what was originally planned. I spend the majority of the day shadowing the Audience team where I tried and tested different parts of this specific job. As I watched more and more recordings from different points of view I suddenly felt like I was in the film, vantage Point. As now and then I saw someone I had worked with. The jobs that the audience team had to take care of involved the taking and signing of release forms from the audience members, as well as giving them pass bands for the studio. They then had to see to the F+F of contestants and made sure they had appropriate seats in the studio. Once they were then settled in the studio, the runners then went up to the office and booked audience members for future shows. Obviously I couldn’t leave until I found a twirl and a flake bar for Noel for Wednesday’s shoots, clearly one of the hardest jobs of the day.

Monday 15th March 2010

My first Day!

It’s the first day and as usual I am looking like a rabbit in headlights, heading into the oversized fishbowl yet again. Its 11:30 and I head into reception to meet the general manager, Annalise Snell. I then go through the order of my week of work, starting with shadowing the first two runners, a studio runner and the gallery runner. As I had mentioned I had never been to a site like this before, Annalise thought it would be a good idea to put me in the audience for the first recording of the day, after getting over my star struck state from seeing Noel earlier that morning, and sorting my make-up out, I was ready for my first show. My first mentor for the day was Amy who sorted out my forms at reception. She kindly gave me a tour of the studio’s and introduced me to the main production crew for the day. After the first show was done I as assisted offset and rejoined the studio runner, Abi Seabourne, whilst the second show was recording. It was exciting to see how she managed to complete her tasks as she described that particular job as ‘racing with time’. After the second recording was over I joined the gallery runner, George James. She then showed me what it’s like to be a Gallery runner, which included tasks such as catering to the needs of the director and the vision mixer and finally collecting tapes at the end of the day.

Endemol West studios!

Active in 25 countries on five continents, Endemol is a global leader in television and audiovisual entertainment. It incorporates a number of production brands including Brighter Pictures, Cheetah Television, Initial and Zeppotron. These four specialise in a broad range of genres including factual entertainment, reality series, specialist factual, arts, live events, music entertainment, documentaries, youth shows and comedy.

Credits include Big Brother,(Channel 4; E4); Deal or No Deal, (Channel 4); Would I Lie to You? (BBC ONE); Golden Balls (ITV1); Comic Relief Does Fame Academy (BBC ONE; BBC THREE; CBBC); Ready Steady Cook (BBC TWO); Soccer Aid (ITV1; ITV2); Orange Playlist (ITV1); and Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe (BBC FOUR; BBC TWO)

Endemol UK has offices in London and Bristol and employs up to 1000 people at any one time.

Endemol West set up as a regional production base in 2004 and encourage local talent particuarly at entry level across production and technical grades. Facilities include 7 multi-cam studios, 4 galleries, production offices, an art/prop department, audience/contestant hold areas, green rooms/make-up, post production (via The Farm Group) including 8 avid adrenalins. Studios/facilities can be hired dependant on availability.

They are currently producing C4 blockbuster ‘Deal or No Deal’.

I have been lucky enough to get 1 week of ork experience working on the show..

Nothin but a muffin productions brings you, our final documentary!

I think we all felt a sense of achievement watching through our final edits on thursday. We could all picture ourselves crowded round the Mac the night before, making sure everything was perfect enough to show. I am happy with our fianl doc. I feel that everything we had worried about the week before we handled very professionally and i am happy by how the group worked together to get everything polished. Even though Jess and Chris did the majority of the editing I feel like I had my input in the last week when it came to my voiceovers and how the whole thing structured out.

When we first had the documentary in mind, we wanted to have a contributor that had a bad experience with laser eye, as well as someone who had it done sucessfully. However as the weeks progressed it wasnt just me and Jess trying to find a bad story contributor who was willing to be on camera, it was all of us. It was then we realised that it would be ok to include an email we got from a certain contributor about her bad story, and then put that into a voiceover. Visually we showed Graphics throughout. I loved this idea, I thought it showed a lot of imagination and creativity.

We then used thursday to look at everyones work. The one critisism the group had for ours was the sound levels and colour correction. And how this showed up on screen. However it was only minor misstakes that didnt make a difference compared to the layout of the whole thing. A proud momento for us all. For the future there would be only one thing I would change. We well worked together as a team however we were a little too optimistic at the start of the planning. This lead to use forgetting to do minor things, such as finding locations and specific contributors. In the future I would plan our time out a bit more, it was similar to my individual project as well. However I dont have any regrets.

The longest week ever..

We used the contructive critisism from the group last week to make our project come together as quickly and efficiently as possible. We met up everyday for the past week to bang our heads together on how to make it as sucessful as possible. We had the beginning sequence, which included the close up and long shot of the text, followed by the clip from the optician who briefly described the sequence of Laser eye surgery for us beofore we went into describing it ourselves. For this we used a vice-over from myslef. One thing I would change about the progression of our work towards this would be to plan it out a bit more. Because of finalising scripts and going through what I had to say It took up some of our recording times. However we did manage to get it finished eventually and the voiceovers worked pretty well. We then went through Eleanors interview with a cut in the middle of her with her child, watching the rough cut showed us that the was excess footage on there about Eleanor that we didnt really need. So we used more information and voiceovers to go over it, as well as the ever important slice of cheese at the end.. even so, the song worked extremelly well with the end credits..