What I Do at University: TV Production

Hey guys, I realised that I never really tell you what goes down in my university life so I thought I’d do a post to tell you what I spent the last semester (September – January) doing.

I study Media Production at the University of Lincoln. I’m currently in my second year and I’m studying two courses: TV production (multi cam) and Film production (single cam). Lemme tell you about them.

This is the class where we learn to make TV programs basically, anything that happens on a studio floor. Game shows, quiz shows, music shows, sitcoms, etc. We work in groups of roughly 15 and together we produce complete TV broadcasts. A project will start with everyone deciding on an idea and will end with the final live broadcast of it. We make the script, the set, hire the cast, operate the cameras, make the graphics and.. Well we do everything. The uni just provides the tools and grades us our performance.

For the first half of the semester we did a lot of warm up exercises. One of them was a simple music program that was had to set up. Nothing to crazy, just pick a song and get a band to play along to it and throw in an interview too. I took on the role of director for this mini-project because I knew I’d be too busy with other stuff to direct the bigger piece. So naturally, being the ass that I am, I decided to bet he first person ever to write/record a completely new track to be performed. So I did. This is how the project came out (i skipped the interview because it was boring and the sound quality was terrible):

After that, we started work on our 15 minute long ‘consumer affairs’ program. Basically we had to make one of those generic ‘exposing faulty/poor quality products’ shows but with a weird genre mixed in. The group chose horror. Our show was to be about a house of horrors where it’s inhabitants would come alive at night to assess poor quality products. Look, I didn’t write the script, okay?

For this project I was the ‘VT’ (video tape) director, meaning I was responsible for all the pre-recorded stuff that happened outside of the studio. It basically meant that all of my work actually happened before the live show. On the actual day that the show went live, I was just responsible for swapping out DVDs and pressing play. That would of course be a fairly simple process if the DVD player didn’t look like this:

Here’s one of the video inserts I produced for the project. It’s not the most interesting thing to watch ever but hey, that’s (british) showbiz.

The best part of the project was when Tim ‘Super Pervert‘ Nichols and one of our cameramen accidentally knocked over one of the cameras during a rehearsal, smashing a £2500 lens. What was funny about this was that the university was very forgiving over the camera smashing thing, what they flipped their lids over was the disrespectful and sarcastic nature of one of the students immediately after the camera had fallen over. The student? Me. The sarcasm? My misconstrued genuine apology on behalf the class. The penalty? One of the worst marks in the class. Awesome!

All in all, the project went well. It ran 2 minutes over schedule and we could’ve probably done with an extra rehearsal but everyone was happy with it and we got the highest mark out of all the groups. Even my ’second worst’ mark was still a 2-1 (kind of like a B+). This semester we have to put out a 30 minute program which the group has agreed will be a sitcom that I’ll be writing. Oh boy.

- TomSka out

asdfmovie2

Hello everyone! Sorry about the inactivity on this blog. I’ve been busy overeating and avoiding uni work. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. Anyway, lets get on with the procrastination post.

With the new decade comes a new asdfmovie. I’ve been promising to make this ever since the first and, 15 months later, here it finally is.

This time I worked with Edd (eddsworld) instead of James (pivotrj) to animate the short. This was mainly because me and Edd are closer as friends/workmates and I trusted him more as an animator to recreate the original aesthetic of the asdfcomics that inspired the films without any real reference material. All Edd got from me was the audio and an animatic (see below) accompanying it. Once he’d animated the skit he’d send over the Flash file and I’d touch up anything that looked a bit messy (i.e. mouths and consistency of line thicknesses).

The hardest part about making the film was definitely writing the skits. It sounds ridiculous but it could actually take up to an hour of deep concentration to think up a skit. Trying to be ‘random’ and original at the same time is a lot harder than you might think. Honestly, try thinking up something random without intentionally ripping anyone off, using pop-culture references or swearing and still be funny too. It takes both time and heavy amounts of real world inspiration. I asked for help from a lot of people including Thomas Costello and Casey Margolis. Of course, being a picky kind of guy I ended up only using my own ideas. Sorry, fellas.

One of Casey’s skits (fax machine) almost made it in but got cut when I was compiling the final version of the movie. The original length of the film was about 2:30 but after some consultation with the test-watchers quite a few got cut out. You can see them here in the deleted scenes:

But enough about making the film. Lets skip to the release.

I woke up at 7:50am on new years day with a nasty headache from a night of drinking that never happened so that I could submit asdfmovie2 just as YouTube ticked over to 2010. In case this doesn’t make sense to you, YouTube runs on Pacific Standard Time so midnight there on America’s west coast is 8am here in the UK. Suffice to say, the film went up exactly one minute into the new decade.. which was nice.

For a couple days everything was normal in the world of YouTube. The movie was getting views and all was well. Until suddenly:

Ashton Kutcher, creator of Punk’d and star of The Butterfly Effect and Dude, Where’s My Car? decided to recommend me to his four million Twitter followers. In short, I was a happy man.

So far that’s about all I can tell you about asdfmovie2. In the upcoming months you can look forward to the release of an animated music video for the song “Totally Gay”, a remix of the “raaaaainbows” skit produced by Stephen ‘sherbethead‘ Grant, by our friend Diwi.

Also I’m working on a poster for asdf2 that I might try and sell in the near future along with the poster I created for asdf1. Any takers?

Well I hope you all enjoyed asdfmovie2 and I look forward to making another one next year possibly maybe who knows. Thanks for the platinum opening week, everyone!

- TomSka out

TomSka: Hero

What have I been up to these last few months? Well, my friends, I’ve been saving the world. Repeatedly.

After releasing MovieMakers, Edd was contacted by a woman named Isabel Morgan who asked if he would be willing to create a short film about climate change to help promote the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. Naturally, being the environmental activists that Edd is, he agreed. Also they said they’d pay him.

Despite the fact that I said I’d be taking a break from writing Eddsworld after MovieMakers so that Edd could produce the next movie without my influence, Edd asked me to come back on board to help him with this project. Naturally, being the loving friend I am, I agreed. Also I read his emails so I knew there would be money.

We drafted a rough screenplay of the film and bounced it over to Isabel who promptly bounced it back with a list of all everything we’d gotten wrong about climate change. Who knew that the internet wasn’t the best way to research the issue? We then wrote a list of all the sound effects we’d need to record and a few weeks later when I was visiting Edd for Matt’s birthday we recorded a large chunk of them. Most of them were sounds from my mouth but a few just couldn’t be faked such as the water effects. Recording those looked a little like this:

That’s a microphone Edd is holding there with a sock on the end to avoid it getting wet. So yes, some of the sounds you hear in that film were me splashing around in a bath tub in Edd’s bathroom. The fun we have.

After that adventure, the rest of the film was pretty straight forward. Just voice acting and animation. We also had some of the music needed for the film ‘taken care of’ by our employers who hired Jack Benfield to compose some original tracks. Tracks I then sped up/reversed. Ha ha ha.

After everything was done and animated, we handed the film over to our commissioners and waited for the release.

But nothing could have prepared me for just what that release entailed..

When the day came, I traveled down to London via a fun filled four hour train ride, met up with Edd and set off to the venue. Expecting to walk into a grim office with gray walls and a small analog TV playing our movie in 4:3 I was blown away when we stepped into a full blown champagne reception, complete with catering staff, canapés and possibly even light jazz. Oh, there was also a wall made of glass that went from frosted to transparent with the press of a button. Astounding. There we met Cheryl Campbell, a partner of Isabel, who introduced us to her two sons. These guys turned out to be the entire reason we were there.

It turned out that while Cheryl was desperately trying to figure out how to appeal to the youth of today, her sons were browsing YouTube and laughing loud enough to draw her attention. This apparently got her thinking. She asked her sons to write a list of their favourite channels. At the top of that list? Eddsworld. The rest is pretty self explanatory.

So there we were, drinking champagne in the poshest part of London at the premier of a film that existed simply because two young fans recommended us to their mum. Incredible. Also at the event was Mike Tapscott (TedCrusty) who too made it on the list. Mike makes fake virals which are made so intentionally poorly that they do in fact go viral. One of his films, Man thrown out Rollercoaster in Horrific Accident, has recieved a horrific eight million views. Keshen Matus (CustardProductions) was another filmmaker involved in the project whose work we saw that night.

An awesome TedCrusty compilation

After the screening of the films, we mingled with journalists, producers and other people wearing ties, It was one of the most surreal nights of my life. So once again, I thank Cheryl Campbell, her sons, Isabel Morgan and everyone else who invited us to become involved with the project. It was quite simply full of win.

Also, thanks to Calum ‘the wonderboy’ Fuller, the whole story got picked up by the BBC and we got our own radio and TV segment. Awesome!

Thanks, Calum!

More on the project: joshwelsh.wordpress.com – tve.org – panda.org

Now, as if solving the worlds environment wasn’t enough, I’ve also been busy cleaning up the streets. Oli, a friend of mine and reoccurring character in my films, let me know about a job for the National Policing Improvement Agency to produce a sort of training film about the methods drug dealers use to communicate. Sounded fun. Sounded like a mini Guy Ritchie film waiting to happen.

After an interview with my potential employers, they asked me to put together a demo reel and a quote for how much I’d be charging for the film. With a surprising amount of difficulty I wrote down how much the film would cost to make and put together demo reel. I sent it off and waited to hear back.

Demo Reel

A few weeks later I got an email me telling me I had the job. Turns out I’d quoted less than the other production companies I was up against. Thousands less. Hah. Since then I’ve been signing contracts, hiring actors and filming on locations with lights and everything. How professional. I obviously won’t be releasing this film anywhere online ever because we wouldn’t want drug dealers knowing that we know what they know now would we? The title shot (above) is all I dare show. It’s good to be connected. Thanks Oli!

Now, which problem should I solve next?

Maybe poverty.

- TomSka out