A Twofour production...

...and I have finished my two week stint at Twofour. It's been a great experience. It's given me a little peak into the world of television. Well, outside of me watching Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, that is. I did get to look at the progress of two of Twofour's other shows they're currently working on that are past the transcribing stage. The editors and producers don't mince their words either; they told us straight up that most of the footage we've transcribe usually doesn't get used.

The first show we got to look at was another show being worked on for the Discovery Channel, but it's at the other end of the spectrum. It's a hidden camera reality show where parents go on holiday for a week, leaving their kids in charge of the house, and in reality, the parents are spying on them, seeing what they get up to when they're not there. The guys working on that show told us they have over 50 hours of footage to sift through for just the first episode, and each episode is an hour long, so there is a lot of editing to be done. The episode we saw is of two teenage brothers, so you can probably predict what they get up to when the parents are away. There's also the addition of a couple of chickens in the family's garden, which they also have to take care of, which leads to some comedy moments when they start throwing eggs at each other, as well as used straw that they're supposed to be cleaning up.

Moving on to the other show. This one is a more serene affair; it's a clip show about major sporting events in the 1980s. When we visited, they were working on Ayrton Senna, which I consider perfect timing, as I'm a big Formula 1 fan. It talked about his dominance at McLaren, as well as his rivalry with Alain Prost, and his tragic death at the San Marino Grand Prix.


I won't dwell on that though. All in all, I enjoyed my time with Twofour, and I'd love to work with them again sometime. I kindly asked Laura to keep me in mind if anything pops up, so I guess fingers crossed...

Twofour: one day left...

Quite the change today. Laura transferred me over to another show now over in a different office. The show I'm working on now doesn't currently have a name; it's a show about tropical diseases, and it's being made for the Discovery Channel.

At the moment, I'm working on footage of one of the doctors in the show making his way by jeep to a hospital in Dar es Salaam, which is a city in Tanzania. This footage is a bit trickier to work with, because of all the road noise. The jeep looks pretty barebones, so obviously little to no soundproofing, and the crew are travelling on dirt roads, so it all adds up to a sometimes inaudible conversation.

There's also the odd location shot in some of the clips, getting shots of local animals, the scenery as they're driving by, and signs of the hospital when they get there; the kind of shots that get used to interlude between scenes that have voiceovers on top.

Twofour: days two - four...

...well, there hasn't really been much to say the past few days, which explains the lack of posts. I'll try to summarise in as much detail as possible...

Day 2: Pretty similar to yesterday; still worked on Jean and Jeanette in the Britain's Biggest Hoarders show, and got a more detailed tour of a couple of places; specifically the Master Control Room (MCR), which is where they keep multiple backups of every show they work on (on hard drives, as well as tapes), as well as the required facilities to archive all the material. There's a minimum of two backups to every single show at any time within the Twofour Plymouth building (they also have offices in London, and they're international as well, with offices in Los Angeles, and Abu Dhabi).

Day 3: Bit of a changeup today; Laura (Johnstone, the person in charge of me and the other people on work experience) switched me from Jean and Jeanette to working on Wendy now. She's quite different to Jean; she seems even more difficult to deal with; Jasmine (Harman, the host of the show) looks visibly frustrated throughout too. I did look her up online after the first day and found out her firsthand experience of hoarding; her mum was an equally compulsive hoarder, and they were actually on a show before called "My Hoarder Mum and Me", which is where "Britain's Biggest Hoarders" has come from, and coincidentally, Twofour also did that show.

Day 4: Changeover again. Laura's now put me on Jeff, who is the one from Plymouth, which was who I was hoping for. He's a former engineer (in the footage I've got, he's also wearing overalls throughout) and seems to be quite a computer geek as well; there's loads of old computers and computing parts around his place, as well as a load of computing magazines. Seems I relate to him a little bit with the computer obsession. It turns out there's also a little memento of his in the Twofour office near where I'm working...

No one there seems to know what it is, and I haven't got a clue either. I tweeted that picture asking if any of my followers knew what it was, but no replies.

Answers on a postcard!

One two, Twofour...

Survived my first day at Twofour. It was actually quite pleasant. I got a quick tour of all the areas first, and then I was given the tutorial on the work I'd be doing. I'm working as a transcriber. The show I'm working on is called "Britain's Biggest Hoarders 2". Have to admit I never watched the first series, but from the footage I've been working on, it seems pretty interesting. The footage I'm currently working on is of a woman named Jean, and her daughter Jeanette. And one of the hoarders in the series is actually from Plymouth, so I'll keep my fingers crossed I get to work on them eventually...

...speaking of Plymouth, they have filmed parts of the series down here. Twofour have a big warehouse where they store the people's stuff and get them to sort through it all, so probably about half of each episode on average is recorded there.