Week 3

Monday was the second rehearsal for never mind the fuzzcocks, in the first rehearsal i was a contestant willingly, but after doing the first rehearsal i felt that i lacked the qiurky comments with all the humour attatched with them. so after that rehearsal i talked to richard alder and asked him if he wanted to take my position as a cantestant, i asked richard because i thought he would be great for the show, richard is a funny guy who doesnt have a hard time making people laugh without trying, i then told ben (the producer) and this all went down fine. So in this rehearsal i then started vision mixing for the show with alex burton directing beside me, although we have different visions of how we want things to look we still get the job done to a satisfactory quality and made a good team. This second rehearsal went pretty bad aswell due to people not really having practiced jokes/combacks etc which is what a show like this really needs to keep it going and the crew myself included wernt really clued up on the running order which just didnt help anything because no one knew when VT's were coming in leaving me clueless and not knowing when to fade to a VT 1 or VT 2. At the end of this rehearsal everyone got together in the studio and talked about all the issues, josh then voulenteered to help by co producing never mind the fuzzcocks, i feel that without josh's input the show wouldnt have gone as sucsessfull as it did.
Me and Lisa Greenaway organised a show called the Irish dancing, this would be a short dance show where a girl called Olivia wouldcome in and perform we arranged for her to come in on the 20th of october which would be a wednesday. Me and Lisa got straight on with pre production for it but the main problem was trying to write out a shot list because we wernt sure how she was going to move around the studio but we did know that she moved around alot which would prove difficult for the cameramen because theyd be moving around too much. We booked the TV studio out for wednesday from 9 -11:15.
We got to wednesday and rehearsed the irish dancing, some people were very reluctant to coming in as wednesday is their day off but we managed to got a crew together. The first problems i had was that Josh and Goerge couldnt operate the cameras for me that day so i immidiatly had to find new camera men. The next problem was lighting it was extremely dark and Olivia's dance took her all around the situation and the studio was lit very darkly. Alex couldnt vision mix for me as he was ill so lisa vision mixed and co directed with me whilst i directed and took control of the crew.
We realised that this would be extremely hard to complete as a live show so we decided to pre record it on the wednesday the 3rd of november.
I had came up with an idea for a bumper which reqiured glow sticks, the idea was that the glowsticks would move around in slow motion in the final version of the bumper and the glowsticks would be different colours and the stratford college version of the children in need logo would be on a layer over the video. This idea failed though even though the studio was pitch black the glowsticks just wern't bright enough so this idea didnt work, the other idea was slowly panning around cameras and the final version would show astons moving out of the camera lenses but we couldnt get the right quality of the video. so neither of these were used.
On the thursday afternoon i spent 2 hours preparing the studio with matt olrenshaw to get it ready for when pegasus bridge came in because it was going to be stressfull enough as it is but would be even worse if nothing was pre prepared.
The day came to finally direct the first crew and band for the live and loud show. I was extremely stressed but the day was still a big success i learnt of the problems i would face filming future bands such as trying to communicate with the camermen and floor manager was near enough impossible because the music was so loud that i literally had to scream to them down the mic so that they could hear me and luckily this did work and we got a nicely shot performance. Another problem we came across was that the bands vocals had over done it the night before at a gig and so he had no voice which effected the quality of the sound but i was still satisfied with the performance and final product, the sound was spot on in terms of our side and so was the visuals. The band also left us with some merchandise to be put in a raffle for children in need which was signed.
Pegasus bridge got in for about 1:30 which was alot later then we were told or expecting but we just had to work with it, once the band got in i helped them getting their eqiupment through into the studio and then once they were set up we got on with a sound check which didnt take to long. We went recorded two of their tracks twice, they were yoko and ribena the second run through was better so that will be used in the final edit. One of the problem that occured whilst filming was that because the camera men could barely hear me they often went off doing their own thing which was a bad idea because if we got to unlucky they could have all ended up on the same shot. This problem occured when paul stringer moved in front of camera 2 a few times and because we wernt fully aware this would show up on camera 2 if we were on it. Luckily on the second run through we managed to avoid this problem after a chat with all my camera operators.