This week the guys go over the recent UR Right Answer competition and why they chose who they chose.
Chris: So if I didn’t know any better, I’d say we had us our first viewer contest for No Right Answer and in the end it turned out rather well. Y’all may be curious as to why we selected the individuals that we did, specifically the submission by Reese and Phil that pitted Bethesda against Bioware, so hey, why not explain things a bit more while I’m here? Let’s get things started, and because I’m such a Negative Nelly, I’ll tell you why our top three finalists didn’t get chosen and why we choose our winner.
(please forgive the audio sync, a fix was not ready at time of publishing)
To be fair, we rather enjoyed all our entries, and I was instantly on the side of this one that had Bill Nye going against Beakman in a rather interesting topic. Sadly, the topic would be part of the undoing as my first response upon hearing “TV scientist” was to instantly think of Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory. This was a rather eye-opening experience as I finally got to experience firsthand what many of you must go through every week when we fail to pick your favorite options. Anyway, I started to then wonder if there were other options out there and couldn’t for the life of me really think of another TV scientist from my childhood. Also the audio wasn’t synced, which was ultimately the downfall.
Using a little kid is always a risky decision as the younger the kid gets, the more unpredictable they become in terms of acting. Sometimes they’re unwieldy and can’t remember lines, whereas other times they gild every line with a golden layer of adorableness. This submission had things somewhere in the middle, with a great brother dynamic that played well, but inevitably seemed more like the older brother asking the younger brother to help. Brotherly love will get you only so far, which in this case would be in the Runners Up position.
I was rather excited to see what Chase and Watson would do for us as we had planned to have them on our podcast not two weeks from now, so when they came at us fast and hard with a debate that purely go it, and by “it” I mean the absurdity of No Right Answer, I was very hopeful. Chase seemed to be channeling my usual type of chaotic energy, whereas Watson kept things subdued like Kyle. But for all the humor, it felt a bit…too close to what we were doing. Not a bad thing of course! No, the bad part was that Chase’s audio kept spiking to the point of splitting the ears of the groundlings, so we had to tell them thanks, but so close. We’re still friends of course. I think. I hope.
As you saw, our choice was something a bit different from our own, and that’s why we selected it. The debate was solid, the choices were sound, and most importantly, the two debaters were wholly their own. Neither of them seemed to be doing an impersonation of Kyle or myself but rather just did their thing and even really opened it up at the end to the viewers to decide, which I appreciated. We have a contest that shines a spotlight on someone else, and they in turn use this as a chance to get discussion going elsewhere. Class act there.
Now let’s get back to our regularly schedules buffoonery!
Kyle: I’ll take my cues from Chris and explain why I did not favor the runners-up for UR Right Answer. And as usual, I will use my cold and bold logic. Because I have a decent reason for all of my decisions. That’s why I have the Rebel Alliance symbol tattooed on my lower back…more on that later, I suppose.
What I loved about this entry was the incredibly specific topic, which had a good nostalgia factor. This is the kind of stuff that makes for a good first episode of the day on an NRA filming day. It gets the nerdy/argumentative juices flowing. Ultimately, this entry did have a lopsided energy quotient. Which works. After all, the two scientists in question were different in the same respect. But I did not choose this one because (like our own episode regarding Doug Funnie vs. Tommy Pickles) it is incredibly generation-specific and accessible only to those of us who happened to be paying attention during these shows and not fiddling with the Hot Wheels car in his pocket…ahem.
Unlike Chris, I’ve got no problems with our smaller, younger viewers. I took the presence of a younger fellow in stride and tried to concentrate on the debate. And really this was a great topic because it combines our two most frequent topics: gaming and comics. My problem with the debate itself is that it seemed to go off the rails, and there seemed to be two different arguments going on. One was which game was better, and the other was which does games better between DC and Marvel. Still, fun times.
I’ve been saying the same thing to Chris, Dan, and Chase and Watson since I saw this entry. What a daring choice of topic. And as Chris pointed out, this debate is very much the spirit of No Right Answer, in as much as the debate is really incomplete and has no specific end. It’s the kind of debate that geeks and nerds and gamers and fanboys and trollers really engage in: the kind where everything is a matter of personal opinion that can be called into question. Also, I really liked the use of the Dan-esque images. But of course there were some issues where the images cut out too quick, and other technical glitches. Not to say the glitches counted for much for me, but timing is everything with jokes and I’ve said many times that the images Dan drops into the video are what make us more amusing.
What I really dig about this entry, our winner, is that these guys really made the show their own. They were more comfortable because they were being themselves, drinking what they wanted to drink, and keeping it as serious or silly as they wanted. And the topic fell right into the happy medium for me. It’s a fairly straightforward topic that is relevant to the gamer world recently, and it was overanalyzed with a kind of scholarly detachment. I really dig it.
Oh, and anybody got a problem with a bunch of people who whipped out a camera and gave it their best shot? If so, go screw yourself. All of our contestants had guts to send a video. And they have all the props I can wrangle.
Dan: Reading through the individual reviews and reasons that Chris gave for why each video fell short might have led some people to think that technical quality was a overly strong deciding factor in choosing a winner. The good thing about having three judges is that you get to have zero chance of a tie, and so while Chris may have focused on some factors and Kyle others, I had yet a third point of view on the videos.
Being as we had someone else do our debating for us, I really have no insight on the points distribution or the debate outcome. That being said, a lot of people have commented on the submissions we got and how the video quality could be better. Now, those reading this are about to be given a very special treat. I am going to give you a crash coarse in video production, so when we do this contest again I can expect some award-winning videos.
Framing
First off, you need to know the rule of thirds. This rule basically instructs you on where to put the person you are filming within the frame. In your mind, imagine three equally spaced lines horizontally and vertically on screen. The spot where the left vertical line and top horizontal line meet is where you want the eyes of your subject. Pop in a movie and try this out, you will see more often than not that it applies. Also notice that if the camera is positioned lower than the person it is filming, they appear powerful, whereas if it is higher, they appear small or weird.
Lighting
Lighting is hard because you are at the mercy of what lamps you have in the house. The simplest form of good lighting is called three point lighting. Basically you want your strongest light at a 30 degree angle from where your subject is looking. This is called your key light. Then take your second, less powerful light and place it on the other side of the subject’s face. This is called the fill, and it keeps your subject from looking like he stepped out of a graphic novel, or leave out this light if that’s the look you’re going for. Finally, draw a straight line from your key light through the subject, and then behind him, and put your least powerful light there. This is called the kicker, and it basically separates the subject out from the background and makes them pop. Make sure all lights are as high as you can place them pointing down, because that’s where the sun comes from and we are wired to think it looks normal.
Sound
Sound is tricky, because it is the most dependent on your equipment. Many of you might be limited to the microphone that is built in to your camera, and that’s ok. There isn’t much you can do about it, but remember to project your voice, and make sure no one’s doing construction outside. If you are lucky enough to have a microphone of any sorts, remember that you want it as close as possible to the subject without being seen. That’s why film crews put them on long poles and stretch them out over the subjects. This pole is called a boom, and it is cool because if you are the boom operator you can say you have a boom stick. Boom sticks are cool. Mostly with sound you need to remember that it’s always better to be too quiet than overblown. Editing software can raise volume but it can’t deal with blown audio.
So there you have it, a crash course on filming. Is there more? Well yea, I have over 10 years of training and experience and I only now barely call myself intermediate/advanced. But when you are out making a web video or some other video project and you throw out that there needs to be more focus on the rule of thirds and that the fill light needs to be higher…well then you just became a Hollywood type. I’ll see you…on the casting couch!
