Living The Budget

My friend Bart Phillips wants to do a pilot…. But (as usual) with not a lot of budget….

My first idea was to try and do the whole thing with rental products.  Well except that two of the products I had in mind, spiral columns and the flatpack wall, were still at the prototype stage.  However the thought was that since the show was centered around some cool dudes they needed a cool place to hang.  Anyway I did a run at a rendering which was well received.  As far as my own agenda was concerned, what I wanted to do was to kickstart the manufacturing process, and incorporating the products into a test job seemed like a good idea and give the client more than he could strictly afford.  Then, for a while set ideas got put on hold as the program went into further development and the original ideas were refined.

What emerged was that there needed to be two very distinct areas - a kind of topical news desk area and an intimate chat area.  Also a live audience was now a requirement not just a idle gesture. Also the time slot seemed to be siding towards daytime and away from early or late evening - so a less laid back environment was on the table…

Also it was thought that the program ought to be rooted geographically, so we needed to see some kind of representation of Atlanta.  Various models from existing daytime shows were discussed, and yet there was still a budget to consider, so our ideas couldn’t get too grand.  In the end I plumped for a relatively cheap modular idea, for the “news desk” area which could be easily extended as the backing for the audience area, and retained my initial desire to use the “flatpack” walls which I felt would be perfect for the “chat” areas.

One of the coolest things about where the technology is now is that I can go out and shoot a nice Atlanta skyline, email the jpeg to a printer and within a few days get a printed backlightable backing ready to shoot.

One thing that “made my day” was that I’d put in a graphic look for a program logo just to have something to fill the screens in the rendering, and it was preferred to the idea that the graphic designers had come up with - so they had to use my renderings as the basis for the show’s graphic look…

The flatpack wall is a perfect answer to a show like this - and it’s something a studio could hold in store in a very compact space and pulled out and assembled a few minutes - instant set!

Now we just need the show to get picked up!

And a show for the spirals to see the light of day on….