5 Tips to Make Small Productions Feel Big

Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke?

Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???

Announcer: This episode…

Biagio: It’s Episode 17 and we’ve got five tips to make small productions feel big. We answer our listener question about how you can promote your own shows without ticking off the network. I go on a little geeky technology rant. Our show goes “Ghost Inside My Child,” is moving to a new network. And you’ll get some juicy details about how Joke tricked me into robbing the cradle, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Announcer: Music courtesy of Dave Pelman Music, davepelman.com

Biagio: Hey, everybody! She is Joke.

Joke: And he’s Biagio.

Biagio: We’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same hopefully by teaming up with us. Well, welcome to episode – what episode, Joke?

Joke: Seventeen.

Biagio: Seventeen, we were just seventeen and you know what I mean.

Joke: I didn’t know you yet when I was 17.

Biagio: It was pretty close. Joke actually lied to me about her age. She told me she was older than she was when I met her.

Joke: No, I didn’t!

Biagio: Were you 18? You weren’t even 18 yet were you?

Joke: Of course I was 18. I wouldn’t let you rob the cradle.

Biagio: She graduated UCLA when she was 19 with three degrees but never told me how old she was until we were, you know. Anyways, moving on….

Joke: That “you know,” implied things that were not correct. Let me set the record straight.

Biagio: Anyways, moving on, so we’d been really, really busy. As you guys know we’ve been working hard on our gigantic AME series, “Don’t Trust Andrew Maine,” which premieres in January. We’re just shooting some final pick-ups, wrapping things up in post – so excited about that show.

And we got a question this week that I thought was very apropos and the question comes amazingly from one of my heroes, Brian Brushwood. For those of you who don’t know, Brian Brushwood is the host of ScamSchool.TV which is like legendary. And one of my personal favorites, the NSFW Show on TWiTtv, him and Justin do that show. And we’ve been lucky enough to be on the NSFW show a couple of times.

Joke: Yeah, those guys are hilarious. If you have never checked out one of their shows, it’s a loss.

Biagio: You are missing out. You should definitely follow Brian Brushwood on Twitter he is at SHWOOD, @shwood, at shwood.

Joke: Are you sure? Because that seems like maybe you spelled that wrong.

Biagio: No, no, no, no, no, it’s at S – H – W – O – O – D.

Joke: Okay

Biagio: He cut-off like the B – R – U to make it shorter. But when you pronounce it’s like at SHWOOD. Like, “I should be following Brian Brushwood.”

Joke: Hmm, good point.

Biagio: Anyways, and by the way we met Brian Brushwood through Andrew Maine, star of “Don’t Trust Andrew Maine,” anyways. Moving on, Brian’s question this week is, “What’s inbound and out-of-bounds when it comes to promoting your own show?” And then he also adds, “And I sincerely love your podcast.”

Well, thank you for the kind words on the podcast. And as to your question, I think this is a really smart question.

Joke: It is. And the short answer, because there is a very short answer to this is, you are allowed to promote whatever the network lets you.

Biagio: That is the short answer. The long answer is by being creative and persuasive, and keeping your relationship with the network you can actually do a lot to promote your own show.

Joke: Every network is different though so it’s very important that you build your relationships with the network and their marketing/social teams, their publicity teams. We’ve had shows that were very under-the-radar, we were the underdog show and kind of could get away with whatever the network was happy with whatever we did.

And then there’s other shows like the one we’re doing right now with AME that the network themselves is putting a lot of publicity and marketing behind it and therefore they’re a little more careful about what we can and can’t say, and we are very much in contact with them about what information gets released when.

Biagio: Yeah, I mean, in general, the best rule of thumb just from where are we going start from is, you don’t want to put anything out the network hasn’t already put out themselves.

So for instance, a bad thing to do would be like, “Hey everybody! I put these scenes from our new show up on our website. Check it out!” That would pretty much ensure that you would get nuked by the network.

On the other hand, when a network releases a promo or network releases a scene or they put out a press release, what you can do is sort of embed that or put that on your own site, your blog, tweet it out and then what usually works really well is to add your own perspective on what’s going on. So how you felt about the promo, why this promo was really exciting to make, or why it was challenging, something where you can give your own personal perspective that adds color to what the network is already doing but doesn’t give away anything the network is holding back.

In the case of our show, there’s a lot of stuff that’s still shrouded in mystery we’re only allowed to say so much. And that’s a good thing because that means the network actually has a plan of attack for how they want to promote the show and that’s fantastic.

Now, on the other hand, sometimes you can approach the network directly and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea, what do you guys think?” With MTV Networks, in our case it’s both MTV and VH1, they’ve always been really good about letting us get out there and twit, and post, and they’ve actually re-blogged, re-twitted, re-posted our stuff, posted our videos. But on top of that we took an idea to VH1 forever ago for our show “Scream Queens.”

Joke: Biagio had the insane idea that he was going to program his very own iPhone app for the show. And when we proposed this to VH1 I think they just thought we would give up because had never actually programmed an iPhone app before and so when we said, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing that,” they said, “Yeah, okay sure. Go right ahead.”

And it was way harder than we thought it was on the outset but we did end up finishing it and they loved it and then they helped push it through iTunes and promote it. And so we got our iPhone app in new and noteworthy in iTunes.

Biagio: Yeah, and that was the first and last thing I ever programmed because man, was that hard. I had no programming experience. I was just like, “Hey, I’ll do it!” And I did it. And I never will again.

But the point was, it was a really cool little bit of extra promotion. On that top of that we even produced and directed several commercials promoting the app that VH1 promoted on their site. It was great. It was really cool. So that was the example of something that I felt sort of got us a little extra noise in the show that was an idea we took to the network.

Joke: So Brian, if you have something to promote, talk to your partners on the project and do whatever you can.

Biagio: Speaking of promoting your own show, our show “Ghost Inside My Child,” is coming back November 30th.

Joke: On the LMN Network. Some of you may remember it as Lifetime Movie Network, that’s no longer what they are. Don’t ask them what the LMRN stands for but they are now LMN, kind of like TLC used to be “The Learning Channel,” and now they’re just TLC.

LMN is LMN, and they are all part of the AME Network. So they’re a sister channel of Bio. They’re actually in more homes and some of the programming from the Bio Channel has been over to LMN and you may have seen some of their shows if you’re a Bio watcher.

And so those shows have kind of migrated to LMN and now they’re moving “Ghost Inside My Child” there as well. So our episodes start airing Saturdays at 9:00 starting this Saturday, November 30th.

Biagio: Yes, so check it out. And we actually thought this would be a great way to lead into this week’s topic which is really how do you take a small show and make it feel big?

Joke: Yes, because “Ghost Inside My Child,” it’s a tight budget, it’s a smaller show, some of the shows we do whether it’s Scream Queens, or the Beauty and the Geeks of the World, you’re dealing with 100 or 200-person crew at times – this, not so much.

It’s a tight team out in the field. It’s a producer, shooter, audio, and a local PA. And in post we’re dealing with two producers, an AP, and an editor.

Biagio: And what is an AP for those who don’t know?

Joke: Associate Producer.

Biagio: Yeah.

Joke: They help us a lot with researching, and story, and paperwork, and all of that stuff. Like I said, we don’t have a huge production team on this so we have our line producer who then also kind of becomes our travel coordinator of sorts. So the AP kind of does a lot, so do the producers. Again, it’s a very independent-minded, we need people who are used to working solo or solo-ish on these kinds of projects.

Biagio: Yeah, so then you’ve got to figure out, “Alright, how am I going to make this show look big, or feel big, or stand-out in a sea of shows that are all produced at the same budget and trying to stretch every single dollar?”

So story always comes first, that goes without saying. But once you know what your story is, the first thing I like to look at is technology. I like to look at both technology in production, technology in post-production that’s sort of cutting edge, that can be done with an indie spirit, that can be done on an indie budget, and that maybe other networks and other shows aren’t doing yet because it’s so new. It’s not really tested and so it’s a little risky.

On our show, believe it or not, when we did the pilot, DSLRs which are like still cameras that shoot video had been very, very big in the Indie film community, not as big in the unscripted television community. I don’t even know if anyone had really used DSLRs in a big way. Now since they have but when we did the pilot we had to go to the network and they were, “We want you to approve us to be able to shoot on these DSLRs. We think it’s going to give the show a unique look. It’s going to feel different. We can really play with the shallow depth of field and it’s going to make the show feel bigger.” They let us, and I think that really went a long way, right, Joke?

Joke: Yeah, and the reason, the shallow depth of field is important is really for the interviews as well because —

Biagio: Which is number 2, Interviews.

Joke: Because when you’re getting these people who are not professional actors or they’re regular people telling kind of emotional stories, and you’re doing it in their home and in their setting, and so you don’t have the benefit of having an Art Department and having hair and make-up, and making everything look amazing. So the shallow depth of field helps make everyday living rooms, and kitchens look nicer than a regular video camera would.

We also shoot two camera angles on every interview to help capture emotional moments, help in the story telling so that it allows us to cut within a story so there’s not a crazy jump cut – we can just cut to the other angle if there’s a lot of uh’s or a moment that, you know, like I’m going through right now.

Biagio: Yeah, exactly. If we would’ve just had two cameras, we would’ve just cut out the um’s and the uh’s and continue the story.

That brings me to number 3 that we did on this show which was how we handled the recreations and the B-roll. And this was very important to me because one of the things that makes a show look big is tons of angles.

Unfortunately, the way the big shows, and the movies, and the people with the budget, the way that they get tons of angles is they take all day to shoot a ton of angles. We didn’t have all day. We had a very short shooting period. In some cases I think we had like a half a day to a day to shoot all the B-roll and all the recreations.

So what we did, again, running with this idea of using the DSLRs and the shallow depth of field is then we took that and we added a little bit more of a reality twist to it. We got a DP and we said to him, “Look, the most important thing in shooting these recreations is sheer number of shots. This isn’t about getting every single lighting set-up perfect. It’s about setting up a scene and you going nuts; you getting in there and being creative, you coming up with a ton of angles and in five minutes I want you to shoot 25 angles because that’s how we’re going to cut the recreations together and that’s how we’re going to make them look good.” And that’s what we did.

And a few of the DPs we interviewed thought it was crazy. One didn’t. he jumped on it and he did a great job and if you noticed there’s a lot of angles on those recreations and that’s because he was running around like a maniac covering the scene in a non-traditional way that I think really got us a lot of bang for the buck, and allowed us to make the show look bigger.

And that brings us to one of my favorites in the end which is V Effects. These days, you can use V Effects imposed in so many ways if you just do a little research on what’s available to you.

One of the things we used a lot in this show was camera mapping. Camera mapping – and I won’t go on forever about this because Joke’s eyes glazed over when I start talking about this stuff – but first, camera mapping is taking a photograph and essentially mapping that photograph onto 3D Geometry and moving a virtual camera around it. What that allows you to do is go to a place like National Archives which are photographs that are essentially owned by the United States Government that are free to anybody that wants to use them, find the great photographs, for free which doesn’t hit your budget, and then create these sort of virtual camera moves flying through these sets. And that went a long way for us on the show.

Another thing that we did is we really pushed the green screen. Green screen’s gotten so much easier to pull. So we took out a little fold-out green screen and we shot a bunch of green screen, brought it back in post. And because it’s a lot easier to pull these days, we were able to create a lot of virtual backgrounds for the recreations. This was stuff that was really hard to do 10 years ago, even five years ago but it’s getting easier and easier.

The thing is, most shops, most productions don’t necessarily do the research and these types of things and so I feel like a lot of shows that can be a little meatier in post, no one’s really going there because you’ve got to do a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and make some after effects with some blender, with some Final Cut Pro, with some Cinema 4D.

And I’ll talk about all that in upcoming episodes but the point is, you can make your show or your project feel much better, much bigger using V Effects, I love them.

Joke: But back to the show, I think another really big aspect of it in post that helps us tell these stories is sound design.

Biagio: I could not agree more. Number 5, Sound Design. To me sound, as I’ve said in earlier podcasts, sound is like 80% of it. Sound is way more important than picture because if you ever go to a movie and the sound goes out people will walk out. If you go to a movie and the picture goes out people will stay because they can follow the story. And that’s why I think that you have to give major consideration to your sound design.

This goes to say [0:15:44] might even be a little over sound design; there’s a lot of crashes, bangings, and booms in that show. But I’ll tell you what, you can listen to it from the other room and you’ll know exactly what’s going on.

Joke: So yeah, if you want to check out our show, it airs Saturdays at 9:00 at the new, brand new spanking new LMN Network. They’re rebranding right now, we’re super excited to be part of the family so Saturdays at 9:00 starting November 30th.

Biagio: That’s it, check it out. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you in two weeks. Until next time, good luck with your projects and bring us some good stuff.

Joke: Talk soon! Happy Thanksgiving!

Biagio: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Take care, bye-bye.

Announcer: Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.