Saturday 29 November 2008

Sky One filming

So this week will see my theatre become a TV studio to record a programme for Sky One with Noel Edmunds. The show is "Noel's Christmas Presents" and will be broadcast on Christmas day. More details will be available nearer the time but for now Sky have this on their website:

http://sky1.sky.com/show/noels-christmas-presents

It will be an interesting week for me, I've never done any TV or film work before. Having to get used to a whole new dictionary of terms is bound to cause some confusion. Quite how two industries so closely linked can have such totally different names for things is slightly odd. But since theatre is far older, I maintain our names are the correct ones!

The content of the show is all pretty secretive given that the nature of the programme revolves around surprises, so I can't really tell you anything more about it at this stage.

We've already done a fair amount of preparation work to make the venue more TV friendly. Mainly involving the removal of seats to make space for cameras. It will be interesting to see how the set turns out. For those who don't know, a scale model is produced before it goes off to the set builders for full size construction. I took a photo of the model for reference which you can see below:



The red box with the teddy on it will be a large video screen for VT with the two sofas centre stage for Noel and his guests and the whole thing is encompassed by a star cloth. How accurate the finished set will be remains to be seen!

It all kicks off properly on Wednesday when we put all the lighting up, Thursday will be set build day and Friday is Sound and Cameras get in. Then we spend all day Saturday in rehearsals followed by the filming on Saturday evening in front of a "live studio theatre audience".

I'll update the blog as and when I have time with photos and more details, but for now "STANDBY STUDIO"!