Pre-production diary

First meeting – In this we were assigned to groups of 4 and told what our chosen round was. We had the TV round so we started brainstorming ideas for questions and possible items to include in our round.

Second meeting – The second meeting we had to organise what was going to be in our round, what questions or strange bits we may want to add. We came up with a list of 20 possible questions to use.

Third meeting – We finalised the questions and chose 4 that we wanted to use, afterwards though realising that it wouldn’t be long enough so we made it up to 6. After this we each went to do our set roles, Artie and Laurie began on the script, Lucy began with the set and I sorted all the graphics, videos and music for our questions. For my job I had to find a picture of the blue power ranger, deal or no deal and Jedward twins off the x factor. The first 2 were simple looking up on google, but for the Jedward the question involved blanking out their faces so I had to think of a way of pixelating them, however I didn’t know how to use Photoshop at the time so I used paint and make a chequered affect that covered their faces. Also I had to find a video of Eva Longoria from desperate housewives so using Kate’s assistance I downloaded the clip from You Tube and cut down the video to the specific part we needed using “Final Cut Pro” on the apple macs. Finally I had to rip the audio from 2 You Tube videos to get the ‘guess the theme tune’ questions.

Fourth meeting – We made sure everyone had sorted what needed to be done during our round and finally agreeing that we had a good round.

Next we split from our round groups and went off into our specific roles. I only did one of my post-production roles jobs though because most of the art directors hardly ever turned up so I got more involved with that role helping the head art director to paint, design and draw parts on. I had to look at the desktop screen of a computer, sketch it and then redraw it onto one of the flats as well as drawing other pieces on other flats. I helped paint the flats and also stayed back to sort out the touch ups needed.

Also I was involved with moving the heavy flats from room to room and had to take the centre flat to be re-cut so that the TV screen behind it would fit in. During all of these we had various practice sessions where I was vision mixer, cameraman, camera assistant and sound operator. During these roles I had to change the shots as the director instructed, get the right camera shots as the director intrsucted, hold the wires so that the cameraman I was assisting didn’t fall over or have obstacles in his way and make sure the studio could here what VT insert sounded like as well as making sure the DVD sound levels didn’t distort.