It’s not every day that I get to say this (well, actually I could, I just don’t) but being the director of an internet / public access TV show is actually really fun. Here’s a general breakdown of how an episode of Highscore goes from inspiration to perspiration and ends up on your screen.
At first, I’ll be out at a dinner, pub, in the woods, kidnapped, or some other place where inspiration strikes me. This turns into a vague idea for an episode. Next, I’ll bounce the idea off of Devon, Eric, and possibly a few other people. We’ll rough out a plot outline and montage, which I’ll turn into a rough draft for a script. Next, Devon and Eric will go over the script in moderate detail, and suggest ideas for gags, non-sequiturs, montage shots & music, and dialog. I’ll write up a second draft, and then we’ll do it again. This may repeat a few more times until the script is considered good enough for production. Now on the day of filming, the script is generally ignored, and referred to as an outline. After several things go wrong (Costumes or props are missing, camera man doesn’t show up or is late, cast members get sick or leave early, mics don’t work, etc.) we’ll finish up shooting somewhere around 2am, everyone highfives, and goes home to bed.
The next day I’ll give everyone a call and tell them what we forgot to shoot, and we’ll come up with an idea on how to fake it and make it look ok. I’ll spend the next 3-4 evenings ripping footage and editing it in premiere, after fx, photoshop, ultra, virtual dub, audition, audacity, and/or any assortment of other programs depending on the needs of the episode. When the whole thing is done (taking up roughly 90 gigs on my hard drive), it’s compressed to divx and xvid copies and uploaded all over the internet, run through winavi, and a dvd copy is made and sent to whatever tv stations we’re partnered with at the time. I’ll let everyone know it’s done, then everyone comes over to my place, we watch the episode, highfive again, and play smash brothers while talking about what we want to do for the next episode.
