Viddy!

I've made a video blog of some of my closing thoughts about the project. Of course I only have so many closing thoughts, so they're pretty similar to those posted below, only in video format. You can find them in the video bar to your right. Appy polly loggies if anyone is blinded by my new bling bling flesh tunnels. I've also published our manifesto online, which you can find in the linky winks. All that remains then, is for me to thank you all for reading and watching, and I hope we've proved that people will watch anything.

Signing off,

m00se

It's all over, Rover.

Today, Anything TV made its debut. And so, the time has come for reflection.

The turnout was pretty low, but the general opinion amongst those who did make it seemed to be positive.I think that we certainly got our point across and managed to make people laugh while doing so, which is always a bonus. It's nice to know that other people find us funny and we're not just two losers laughing at our own jokes...

Having previously worked in a large group for Experimental Performance, we had found it difficult to organise meeting at times when everyone was available. Working in a pair, it was much easier to arrange meeting and therefore allowed us to spend more time bouncing ideas off of each other, rather than working alone and then bringing our individual research and ideas together. This also meant the workload was very evenly spread. In my experience, often in a large group some people will end up doing much more to contribute than others. Leigh being ill set us back a week, but this didn't seem to affect our project in the long term. Luckily we'd planned all our shots by that time, so the two days of shooting was the only thing that had to be set back.

The concept of "people will watch anything" was something which very much appealed to both of us. After being made to sit through "The Hills" one too many times, we decided we had to do something about it. And so, Anything TV was born. We chose to take familiar shows and formats people would recognise instantly (such as Big Brother, Deal Or No Deal and What Not To Wear) and create amusing parodies in an attempt to illustrate just how mindless most television programmes are today.

As I think I mentioned in my video blogs, I had used a Panasonic camera and iMovie before, so we didn't really have any problems during the shoot and edit. We managed to use only three different locations, and were able to make them look different by shooting in different rooms and from different angles. I think this saved us a lot of time because it meant the transition between sketches was very easy. Having a rough shooting schedule was also helpful, as mentioned in my previous post.

It may be hard to believe, but in fact the piece was largely unscripted. We had discussed what point we wanted to get across with each sketch as well as the infommercial sections, but found we actually worked better without the constraints of a written script. Sometimes the best jokes are spontaneous, and although it was potentially a gamble, we barely had to do any second takes.

I think that, if we had more time, we could have come up with some more ideas and produced a longer piece. Obviously we only had a limited amount of time, not only do to the project, but also as to how long the final piece should run for. As I mentioned in my video blog, I would also have been interested to see if we could have achieved a level of fame akin to that of Chris Crocker and lonelygirl15 over a sustained period of time. And who knows? Maybe we still could...

That's a wrap!

We had a very productive day today. Oh yes. I am very excited to tell you that I currently have the DVD of "Anything TV" sitting next to me. We started shooting fairly early today, and thanks to a well-thought out shooting schedule we knew exactly what we had to do and in what order, which meant we had a lot more time to edit than if we'd wasted too much time working out what needed to be shot, where we could shoot it, and what we were going to say. So having learnt from my previous experience of film making, I insisted we get all that hoopla and flotsam and jetsam out of the way the day before. As a result, the edit is much stronger because we weren't at all rushed. We even had time to play around with iDVD and create a lovely animated title menu screen, featuring our Anything TV logo. I love it, Leigh loves it, we hope you'll love it too.

I'd also like to do a quick shout-out (or perhaps type-out is more appropriate) to the lovely Fay (aka Mrs Iceman), who acted as camera person for the sketches which featured both of us. She did an excellent job of filming the absolute nonsense we'd come up with, so thanks Faybee :-)

Anyway, we think it looks real horrorshow and can't wait to show it off. I don't know how many people are planning on coming to the screening tomorrow, but I'll be sure to post it on YouTube afterwards, so viddy well, and let us know what you think!

Moving on up...

Today we wrapped filming here at our first location, my domy. Which means that tomorrow, we move to the far more exotic location of the Newton Park campus. Everything is going well so far, and we've come up with a brief schedule for tomorrow, just so we know what's left to be done and don't forget anything. I don't want to give too much away, so let me just say that I'm very happy with what we've done so far...

Lights, Camera, Action!

Actually, that's just a myth. No director actually says "Lights, camera, action". I believe the correct terminology is, "Run to record", after which the camera person says "Recording" and the stage manager says the shot and take number. Only then is "action" called. So there.

We're a week behind everyone else because Leigh hasn't been very well, but he's now on the mend, and day one of the shoot went very well. We managed to get almost all of the interior shots here at Casa del Moose done, which leaves us with only a couple more to do today. Then tomorrow, we're hoping to shoot the exteriors here and the interiors up on campus. Details to follow on the group blog. Peace.

I'm a blogging whore.

I'm aware that I've been neglecting this bloggywog of late, and instead favouring myself and Leigh's blog at www.peoplewillreadanything.blogspot.com. But there's a very good reason for that. I'm VERY excited about the project we're planning. We've been scouring the Internet and have come up with a lot of research, much of which can be found on the group blog. We've questioned every new thing that we've learnt so far in this module, and as a result, come up with what we thing are some really original and interesting ideas. The only problem we're having now is narrowing it down to just one idea that we want to focus on. While "People Will Watch Anything" is still at the forefront of the project, that statement raises a lot of other questions and sub-topics, which we're having difficulty narrowing down.

Our main idea at the moment is to create a series of sketches which parody such popular television programme formats as Big Brother. Obviously these would be exaggurated somewhat, in order to illustrate our point (i.e. just how pointless/ridiculous they are). Humour is an excellent way of getting people to pay attention, so the funnier and more dramatic we can make them, the better. Anyway, we know what we think, and if we can sit through a double bill of Laguna Beach and come out the other side, by God, we can get through this.

Remediation, remediation, remediation...

is a tricky concept. Which is why I let Leigh do the explaining. Check the group blog for more deets.