Pranks

For our television show we want to use VT’s of pranks, and in our groups we have been researching various shows that have also done this type of thing. The main influence is Balls of Steel. This is very much like our idea, except we have our own characters.

Balls of steel uses many different situations, and is always hidden camera. We also want to keep our pranks all hidden camera, as it is also good to catch the victims reaction once they realise they have been pranked.

The characters we have thought about so far are :

• Awkward Allen, a character that just gets involved in peoples conversations, if there are a group of friends chatting in a bar, allen will just walk up to them and sit with them, or start laughing as therer are laughing, making the victims feel very awkward.

• Patsy Postbox, a character that hides inside a postbox, and talks to the victims, it beign people walking past or people trying to post a letter. Patsy would make the victims jump and scare them as it is not something you expect when trying to post a letter.

• Sammy the seagull, a character that is a person dressed in a seagull outfit, and basically terrorises the public, scaring the children at the beach by stealing chips, and acting like a seagull but obviously in human form. This idea is based on the seagulls shown in the film ‘Finding Nemo’ who has the catchphrase ‘mine,mine,mine,mine’ this is also something we would use in our pranks.

• Background boy, this character is just the basic and well known prank who scares people by jumping out on them, he would forever be in the background like a normal person in public, but would then suddenly jump out with a mask or just shout to make them jump.

We have developed these idea’s, and began to think of pranks that would be re-occurring throughout the show, and to become a regular and recognised part of the show, we would want our characters to be known for their particular prank.

For our show we also need to make sure that the person we have pranked, will give their permission for the prank to be shown and that no one becomes offended by these pranks, and that they are just made for comedy.

There are various prank tv shows, and online youtube channels, we researched for our prank segment. The main influence being ‘Balls Of Steel’. The main reason for this being, that our show is a magazine show, so combining pranks and a magazine show, this is the closest we got.

I watched a few episodes of this to see how they introduce the pranks and what sort of things they talk about, whether it being after or before they show the video tape. As pranks are not often a segment shown on a magazine show, we needed to know how to be able to get it to fit in.

Other shows and online pranks I watched were:

• BBC’s Just for laughs
• Prank patrol
• Stitch Up

Multi Camera Research

Our television show is going to be a magazine show, which means that it is going to be involving lots of VT sections. To start of our research, we had to look at different forms of multi-camera shows. There are many different types such as :

·         Sport Shows

·         Entertainment Shows (E.g XFactor)

·         Reality TV Shows

·         Chat Shows

·         Live Events

·         Soaps

For this research i watched many different kinds of these programmes and started to take more notice of how many different cameras shots were involved.

I watched the TV programme Big Brother and began to understand the amount of cameras that are actually used in making this reality show to capture every single thing, in all the different rooms.

Various programmes that are going to relate to the type of show we are going to create are programmes such as The One Show,OK TV, and even like Mock The Week. The setup for camera’s for a show like these, can often look this :

Which is almost identical to the setup we are going to have for our own show. The main use for multi camera, is for the different cameras to be able to switch between the different people on the set, changing the variety of shots as they are needed, e.g a close up of someone who is answering a question, or a presenter asking a panel a question. For a show like 'The One Show', a magazine show format, it also helps with the editing after, and saves alot of time, as the programme would all be filmed together, apart from the included VT's, and things like lighting would not often needed to be changed.

Live shows almost always use multi-camera formats, as the more cameras used, the less mistakes shown as it gives the person on the vision mixer more of a chance to change the shot shown on screen.

My Role

My original role for this project was to be on lights, this involved controlling all the lighting in the studio, choosing different colour lighting for a better effect, and being able to use my initiative as to when the lights needed to change. This though was a shared job with Sam, most of the time there wasn’t much for us to do, so I took the graphics job. This involved in playing the credits and video’s we needed for our television show. We had many of these throughout, so timing and listening to the director was crucial.

I was also involved in the pranks section of the show, which I filmed some of and came up with the ideas. Our original idea was to break into groups and film our own separate pranks, and then have an audience to vote, which they preferred on the show. But with a lot of our lessons mainly being practice for the actual run through of the television show, It was often hard to get everyone together at the same time to carry out most of our ideas, and be able to have the vt all done and edited ready for our dress rehearsal. So instead we joined together as a group and decided on which ideas were our favourites, and went and filmed them in and around college.

My main role for this project was the graphics, which involved playing the different video sections of the show, on time and making sure they were all in order and run smoothly. As our TV show was a magazine show, most of it was made up of different VT’s that everyone had made, it being short adverts or interviews.

We had a few technical difficulties with badly exported videos, but due to time constraints I managed to cut the bad quality parts of the video, to able to get on with filming.