Just when you thought where the You Show was headed (well we doubt you thought that, but it sounds good), something unexpected happens in Episode 5
The idea for this emerged from conversations Brian and had during the latter week of the Audio unit. We fully accepted that the pace of the You Show was blistering, and only a handful of people even started audio, while others were still finding their pace in their blogs. In addition, this week at TRU is Reading Week, and while there are no classes, faculty and staff do have extra scheduled professional development activities.
So we thought, let’s change0up our schedule, in fact, let’s do something to suggest that it has been suspended a week, hence the name of Episode 5 as “Technical Difficulties” (double entendre intended). In fact, since this week Tannis Morgan was visiting from the Justice Institute of British Columbia, I imagined the idea that she would be this “Consultant from Vancouver” brought in to shake things up at the You Show.
The script ended up pretty easy to write, in fact I wrote it a few hours before we planned the shoot. The set was again the Innovation Lab in Open Learning, with the orange wall being the “set” and the table with computers being the tech booth.
We start with what is supposed to be a cheesy video intro, as supposedly we are starting the video unit:
For the intro waves and lightning backdrop, I used a clip of an After Effects demo with a green screen clip of computer modeled projector. The audio is a track of Brian and I talking over music from an Epic Trailer Music YouTube video.
The premise was that Brian and Alan start as normal, then Tannis would bust in the room. In the moment, we thought of having a hand written sign on the door that she would rip off as she came in, and even toss at us.
The shoot was set up to film Brian and I as normal with my iPad, but have a second high end video camera set up by Jon Fulton to be the wide shot. Jon even set up Tannis with a lav mic so we got good sound from her.
And the idea was as she ranted at us for being amateur (I insisted on a line “This is a media injustice” in reference to where Tannis works), that the real technical guys, Jon and Bob Byrne, would walk in setting up lights and equipment. Those guys are pro, they did it perfectly, Bob even flashing the lights on us before we were dismissed to wardrobe. They even replaced the hand made sign on the door with a more professional one.
In this scene she tips over the iPad camera (so it flips upward briefly showing the ceiling, before switching to camera 2. In between I used some brief cutaways to have different views shown.
Tannis would then gesture to “the clowns in the booth”, the tech guys, and send them out to coffee; which they do. This is part of the evolution of the characters; the tech guys get less and less necessary, soon perhaps to be made redundant.
The video then just goes to an old time “Technical Difficulties” clip which had some great music which was extending under the closing credits. Brian’s son Harry who usually participates, had just shown up after we finished, so I suggested he come in curious, and just roll up the sign from the door.
It could not have been executed much better. We did about 2 or 3 walk throughs, poor Tannis had the most required lines. Much of what Brian and I do are made up on the spot. But everything you see there was done in one take.
You can see a bit more behind the scenes action via the outtakes
And Episode 6 will have to return with a whole new format…