THE NEWS IS A JOKE: Mad As Hell and Updates
On Tuesday the 2nd of October, myself, Darcy, Chloe, Emilienne, Hao and Zac attended a taping of Shaun Micaleff’s ‘Mad as Hell’. We had booked these tickets earlier in September and had anticipated more people from the class to come, but despite the few spare tickets, the 6 of us headed to the ABC studios for what would be a very entertaining night.
Being in the audience for a show like ‘Mad As Hell’ really opened our eyes into how much goes into the production of a news show, even if it only runs for roughly 28 minutes. The show is filmed on a Tuesday night, and airs on Wednesday, meaning we technically weren’t a ‘live’ audience and that left room for errors and slip-ups for the cast and crew. In comparison to Studio A at RMIT, the Mad As Hell studio was roughly 4 times the size. At Mad as Hell, the set includes a number of stages. One being the main set, Shaun Micaleff’s desk and room, next to it being a smaller room used for a number of sketches, and against the wall was a green screen, used for small clips requiring a cut to another host or guest on the show.
Experiencing being in the live audience of a comedy news show like Mad as Hell whilst being a comedy news student is certainly a worthwhile experiencing. Having the ability to apply theories, facts and information you have gathered in the semester to a real-life experience happening in front of you is gratifying, interesting and overall eye-opening.
As for the studio project, it’s safe to say that I am stressed. Within the weeks we’ve been working on the assignment it feels as though not as much progress has been made as I had hoped for. Many of the scripts aren’t completed and a number of people haven’t attended class or contacted any of us, which has certainly proved to be frustrating. The lack of preparation is something however that we are working around. The frustration with the script isn’t something we can easily fix, it just puts pressure on us as a team to have things prepared by week 11 and causes a large amount of frustration for those of us in the control room. Especially when I’m directing, I’m struggling to put together my segment and visualise it when I don’t have graphics, EVS or a finished script. It’s impossible to piece together a puzzle when you don’t have all the pieces and that’s how it feels trying to direct a segment with missing pieces.
I know that once we get to week 11 and ‘shit gets serious’, that everything will literally have to be complete, but for the time being, rehearsing and structuring ‘Early Afternoon’ is challenging. In the meantime, I’ve offered my assistance in building the Vegans and Vaccines script, and have been trying to help Darcy in lengthening the Bendigo script with the help of Ruth who’s been helpful in giving ideas for things to bring into and out of the script.