The making of episode 4 has been a bit of an odd affair. Firstly it's important to note that it was filmed before Paganello, so there are a few mentions of Paga being in the future, obviously it is now in the past. We had to record an intro in a pub after practice to explain the problem, which Steve is going to strap on to the front of the show.
Episode 4 features our new agony Ultimate uncle, Clary. Clary is the oldest living Ultimate player, we manage to call him on the show and ask him about an incident from last years EUCF. Clary has to break off from his bathtime to speak to us, but it's well worth while. Got an Ultimate conundrum? Maybe Clary can help, what he lacks in tact he makes up for in wisdom. Send us an email with your problem and we'll put it to Clary next time we speak to him.
There's also a heap of exciting sofa based chat, photo news, some emails, and my photography section which I hope you find useful. If you have further questions about photography
then feel free to send them in, if we think that answering them in the show will be useful then we'll do just that.
One of the things we've learnt from Paganello is that simple is good. Our one mic, one camera solution didn't give is much scope for messing around with fancy camera angles, but it did mean we were fast. Easy to set up (approx 90 secs), and easy to move around (only one cable).
By contrast our home sofa set up involves two wireless mics, two receivers, a mic mixer, numerous cables and things that need to be plugged in and several batteries that can run out. It take us about 45 minutes to set up and we do a ten minute sound check before every episode, even then we have issues. As you can see from this episode where both my mic and Steve's mic take it in turns to go dead. We may well be trading down to a simple cheaper wired mic solution in the future, probably before Episode 5.
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Thursday, 27 March 2008
Blockstack at Paganello Review
I've finished cleaning sand out of my bag. I've had some sleep. I've reflected on the amazing time we had. I've even watched the 4 days of coverage from the Rimini sands.
Both Steve and myself worked our socks off all week. We had less sleep than anyone. During the finals we commentated on all 4 games. We were still defrosting Steve's hands an hour after we left the beach and you may notice that some of the camera work is a little shaky due to shivering.
With everything considered I think we did a decent job of capturing the character and atmosphere of the event, but our opinion is not really that important. What is important is what you the viewers thought of it.
Get your commenting fingers ready and bust out your feedback.
Both Steve and myself worked our socks off all week. We had less sleep than anyone. During the finals we commentated on all 4 games. We were still defrosting Steve's hands an hour after we left the beach and you may notice that some of the camera work is a little shaky due to shivering.
With everything considered I think we did a decent job of capturing the character and atmosphere of the event, but our opinion is not really that important. What is important is what you the viewers thought of it.
Get your commenting fingers ready and bust out your feedback.
- What was your favourite bit?
- Did any of it bore you?
- What did you want to see more of?
- Did you get a feel for the tournament?
Monday, 17 March 2008
Paganello TV...4 days to go
Friday will mark the release of Paga TV Episode 1, straight from the beaches of Rimini Italy!
With Paganello being probably the best beach tournament in the world, this is both an intimidating venture for us as it'll be the first time we'll be knocking out episodes with only hours of editing time, AND, we'll be very susceptible to adverse weather. I've checked weather.co.uk and found that it looks like rain almost every day. Not good.
All that said it'll still make for some good viewing. People don't want to see others lounging about on sun drenched beaches sending mocking text messages to those still home saying 'wish u wer here ha ha'. Viewers want to see adversity. I've been to a Paga with howling winds, 5-10 deg temperatures and while we bonded as a team, I don't recall being so cold while playing before or since. This time in addition to my own health, I've got a few thousand pounds of video and audio equipment to protect as well. Hmmm....
Right...so all that said we're going to get some great footage regardless of the conditions of the play, the players and the scene and at the very least it can't be anything but entertaining.
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Episode #2 - The Making of
Little do the viewers know but there are actually two complete versions of Episode #2. Both of them cover the same material. The first one we recorded on the Thursday before the release was meant to be 30 to 45 minutes long as we'd tried to learn from the massive over-run on Episode #1 and cut down our skeleton significantly.Well...the bevy for the originally E2 was Capirinhas from Brazil! We chatting way too long about these, Tom went on and on about his snowboarding holiday and generally we just rambled about nonsense way too much. The reason being...our precious crew wasn't there for this one. It was a full DIY podcast for Tom and I and we screwed it all up.
To quote Tom after watching the editing version (already cut from 75 minutes to 50 minutes) " I just keep saying the same thing as you using different words! ".
Rather than release it we decided to bin it keeping only the advert for 'Ultimate BlockStack' we shot at the very end of that Thursday (lookout for more stuff like this in future episodes!). There was so many things wrong with it. Even the sound was crap again.
So...Sunday night we brought in the crew and trimmed down the schedule with actual times and hit it again. We also decided on filming photonews as a separate thing because of the laptop lag. That was a good idea. Having the crew to wave at us when we were faffing, going off topic or running out of time was so helpful. I think it really rocked. We switched drinks to a nice Banrock Station wine as well which we thought was a great environmental move until we filmed it and realised mid discussion it had a massive carbon footprint. Oops. Oh well. So we nailed a 30 min episode on the nose. Lets hope we can keep it up and speed up the editing as well!
Friday, 25 January 2008
BlockStack does GB Open
I went down to the GB Open practice that took place at Loughborough University with the plan to film some practice stuff, maybe get a bit of action on film to, with some clever editing , give those who watch the clip a bit of a scare and also get some interviews with the players we can use as profiles on the show.
Well the first thing that went wrong was I got there later than I wanted and nobody was there! Thankfully there were tons of bags and discs all over the artificial turf pitch indicating I at least had the right pitch. Oh yeah they were practising on this high-tech artificial turf. Take a close look at any of the pics and tell me it doesn't look like grass. It was pretty sweet stuff. The give away was it was probably the only grass in England at the moment that wasn't flooded.
So, eventually they returned to the pitch after a bit of a team talk inside the nearby warmth of a meeting room. I then managed to get a few early interviews with a couple of the guys based on a bit of a script we'd written for them to answer.
The Script:
This was the plan...we'll right some questions on a piece of paper, they could read them all in advance, and then deliver the answers to the camera without pressure, cool and calm. Right? Not so much, however, some of the reactions I got were great, some were almost professional and others were near on autistic but nevertheless entertaining.
Afterwards I was excited and ready to film some action and was promptly told they were going to play offence vs defence and that I couldn't film it. : (. Bollocks. I can only imagine this was because they were aware of the vast appeal of BlockStack and simple knew that teams like Sockeye, Furious and Skogs would be glued to the broadcast looking for the Achilles heal of the GB team. Well because I know that all good players do watch the podcast on a regular basis this was a well founded precaution. So I didn't film. I did take a few good profile shots and out of about 250 crap pics I managed to scrape a few good ones as well. Thank goodness I brought my camera otherwise I'd have just be there getting very cold and wet. Afterwards I got a few good snaps and a couple more interviews, enough to make it worthwhile.
Personally it was superb because although I couldn't film the tactics of the open team I did get to watch and learn. So, look for the new book from BlockStack soon to hit good Ultimate shops near you 'How to Play Ultimate like Great Britain Open' and of course watch BlockStack Episode three for the GB Open featurette.
Well the first thing that went wrong was I got there later than I wanted and nobody was there! Thankfully there were tons of bags and discs all over the artificial turf pitch indicating I at least had the right pitch. Oh yeah they were practising on this high-tech artificial turf. Take a close look at any of the pics and tell me it doesn't look like grass. It was pretty sweet stuff. The give away was it was probably the only grass in England at the moment that wasn't flooded.
So, eventually they returned to the pitch after a bit of a team talk inside the nearby warmth of a meeting room. I then managed to get a few early interviews with a couple of the guys based on a bit of a script we'd written for them to answer.
The Script:
This was the plan...we'll right some questions on a piece of paper, they could read them all in advance, and then deliver the answers to the camera without pressure, cool and calm. Right? Not so much, however, some of the reactions I got were great, some were almost professional and others were near on autistic but nevertheless entertaining.
Afterwards I was excited and ready to film some action and was promptly told they were going to play offence vs defence and that I couldn't film it. : (. Bollocks. I can only imagine this was because they were aware of the vast appeal of BlockStack and simple knew that teams like Sockeye, Furious and Skogs would be glued to the broadcast looking for the Achilles heal of the GB team. Well because I know that all good players do watch the podcast on a regular basis this was a well founded precaution. So I didn't film. I did take a few good profile shots and out of about 250 crap pics I managed to scrape a few good ones as well. Thank goodness I brought my camera otherwise I'd have just be there getting very cold and wet. Afterwards I got a few good snaps and a couple more interviews, enough to make it worthwhile.
Personally it was superb because although I couldn't film the tactics of the open team I did get to watch and learn. So, look for the new book from BlockStack soon to hit good Ultimate shops near you 'How to Play Ultimate like Great Britain Open' and of course watch BlockStack Episode three for the GB Open featurette.
Friday, 11 January 2008
Episode 1: The Making of....
Hosts: Steve Giguere and Tom Styles
Crew: Allison Baron and Cat Styles
Camera: JVC Everio MG505 3CCD Harddisk Video Camera.
Sound: Cheap wireless tie clip mics and a mixer.
Subjects: Photo News, Christmas gifts (The Powerball), Ultimatum, The Top 5 Ultimate Frisbee things of 2007 in the UK and the Great Barr Crawl Tournament.
Behind the Scenes:
We filmed this over the holidays. We had planned on filming it on New Years Eve and then ended up doing it just prior with the idea that we'd pretend it was New Years Eve but that didn't really work out. This was the first episode and we really wanted it to go off in a single take. That is the plan for most of the episodes so this isn't any clever editing and you can a real feel for the 'anything goes' aspect of it. The problem was our skeleton of a plan for it didn't take into account the ramblings that inevitably followed which made our plan of 30 to 45 mins extend into over an hour. Oops. As a result we release it in two parts.
We had all sorts of technical problems with the sound. First we had bought two wireless mics. We then found out the frequency of the wireless could not be adjusted so we could only use one at a time. We had an idea to get a two to one input jack and put both mics into one unit. Great right! Wrong. The mics had a special screw it connection so the whole time we're talking we're one wrong move from the whole sound contraption falling apart. That's mainly why we're trying not to move very suddenly the whole time.
The last issue really was the lighting. What you can't see is ever light in my house piled around us and aimed straight at the couch. The camera is placed just right so it seems to clip out all of them. The camera was actually the only thing that worked really well. I highly recommend it.
What else....the freakin dog kept trying to jump on us...the crew forgot to turn off their mobile phones so I had to filter out that...'dit...ditadit...ditadit....' sound thoughout the first half of the video. LOTS of white balance work and hiss and humm removal required on the sound but I think it turned out ok.
Oh one last issue was my mic was facing the wrong direction almost the whole time. You could hear me ok but not good enough.
Lessons learned: Sound is critical. We're getting another mic at a different frequency (this is getting expensive now) and we'll do more sound checks next time. Also...going on for over an hour combined with mulled wine = more rambling. We've got a better idea of how long things take now so we'll be doing shorted episodes more often.
We've got over 200 views on each part so far...hooray!
Steve
Saturday, 22 December 2007
WCBU The final wrap-up
Hello,
So on a personal note...we lost. The GB Masters fought hard to come back from 5-8 down to make it 9-8. We felt good for the win and inspired even more so by the women's team giving us a quality breast wave complete with Union Jack nipplies after each point. All that said, GB and the USA were very evenly matched and as the game swung back and forth, the timing favoured them as it ended in the cap with them taking it 11-9. Tragic in one sense but triumphant in another as we know we did very well against them and they were a great bunch of guys to lose to. USA did sympathise as they lost in the final in 2004 to Austria after a tough one. Perhaps that means it's ours in 2011.
The GB Women...what can I say about them. They were top class performers on pitch and off. I made a lot of new friends on this trip, many of which were on this team and I was extremely proud to be playing GB as they took took revenge for our loss by winning by 3 over the US team. Going into the final each team had a win against each other but I believe this time the better team won. GB had it all together and had the spirit going for them as well.
The medal award itself was really well done. I'll get a picture of it online in my flickr area in a moment. The women's gold version was a gold medal on a green string (very Brasil). Something cool enough that you could wear out and not just put on a trophy shelf.
I'm sorry that this entry took so long. To summarise quickly what happened that day,
1. lost the final to USA by 10:30.
2. Partied with the USA for a bit and then with the GB Mixed team cheering on the Women
3. Drank too much Cachaca from a can and memory loss begins here abouts...
4. Had to rush to Bus Station to get tickets back to Pipa that night because there was only 4 left. It's a miracle this happened at all but thanks goes to Anna Shipman for alerting me to the urgency of the situation.
5. Return to event with women winning gold and to watch the Aussies beat the fan favouriate Phillipines to take gold in the open division
6. More beer...swimming in the sea...a nap and almost missed my bus to Pipa. No internet in Pipa, sorry.
I did try to write an entry back at the hotel but you really should see it. Perhaps I should post it because it really is a pile of drunken jibberish.
Well done to all teams at WCBU and all players who stepped up to represent their country. There's part of me that want's WCBU to take on the same level as WUGC but at the same time, I hope that each countries top grass players still concentrate on there not so sandy area of expertise so that that Beach World Championship stays the big competitive chill-out party that it is.
Thanks Brasil and thanks to Patrick for another success.
So on a personal note...we lost. The GB Masters fought hard to come back from 5-8 down to make it 9-8. We felt good for the win and inspired even more so by the women's team giving us a quality breast wave complete with Union Jack nipplies after each point. All that said, GB and the USA were very evenly matched and as the game swung back and forth, the timing favoured them as it ended in the cap with them taking it 11-9. Tragic in one sense but triumphant in another as we know we did very well against them and they were a great bunch of guys to lose to. USA did sympathise as they lost in the final in 2004 to Austria after a tough one. Perhaps that means it's ours in 2011.
The GB Women...what can I say about them. They were top class performers on pitch and off. I made a lot of new friends on this trip, many of which were on this team and I was extremely proud to be playing GB as they took took revenge for our loss by winning by 3 over the US team. Going into the final each team had a win against each other but I believe this time the better team won. GB had it all together and had the spirit going for them as well.
The medal award itself was really well done. I'll get a picture of it online in my flickr area in a moment. The women's gold version was a gold medal on a green string (very Brasil). Something cool enough that you could wear out and not just put on a trophy shelf.
I'm sorry that this entry took so long. To summarise quickly what happened that day,
1. lost the final to USA by 10:30.
2. Partied with the USA for a bit and then with the GB Mixed team cheering on the Women
3. Drank too much Cachaca from a can and memory loss begins here abouts...
4. Had to rush to Bus Station to get tickets back to Pipa that night because there was only 4 left. It's a miracle this happened at all but thanks goes to Anna Shipman for alerting me to the urgency of the situation.
5. Return to event with women winning gold and to watch the Aussies beat the fan favouriate Phillipines to take gold in the open division
6. More beer...swimming in the sea...a nap and almost missed my bus to Pipa. No internet in Pipa, sorry.
I did try to write an entry back at the hotel but you really should see it. Perhaps I should post it because it really is a pile of drunken jibberish.
Well done to all teams at WCBU and all players who stepped up to represent their country. There's part of me that want's WCBU to take on the same level as WUGC but at the same time, I hope that each countries top grass players still concentrate on there not so sandy area of expertise so that that Beach World Championship stays the big competitive chill-out party that it is.
Thanks Brasil and thanks to Patrick for another success.
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