Tools We Use To Make TV Shows

Biagio: Hey everybody, she is joke. He’s 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, today is episode 82 and we want to do a little bit more of a sort of hands on nuts and bolts podcast. You know, a lot of people have asked us at various times, what do you use to make TV? You know, what software do you use? What cameras do you shoot with? And I what I wanted to do today was answer those questions, kind of tell you exactly what we’re using day to day, you know, here at our company to make TV shows, to do pilots, to make pitch tapes, to make pitch decks. But at the same time, I think I want to explain why we use what we use. And I want you to know that it almost doesn’t matter what you use, as long as you’re getting what you need out of it. That said, some programs work better than others for certain things, so I will also share with you why we make the choices we do. What I don’t want this to be as a fanboy podcast or a fan girl podcast, where we’re just trying to slam what we use down your throat. But I hope that you can find some takeaways today to help you choose what’s going to work best for you. Does that all sound about right? Joke? It sure does. Hip hip hooray! I think I want to start with the question we get asked most often. Which is which camera should I buy? Which cameras do you use? Let me let me tell you, when it comes to shooting pitch tapes, putting together your presentations, there actually is an answer. The very best camera is whichever one you have. I know that sounds like a cop out, but it’s completely true. You don’t need to spend tons and tons of money on a camera to put together fantastic presentations. I mean, look, I don’t need to tell you. Anybody who watches YouTube today can see kids putting out terrific video that they’ve shot on phones, they’ve shot on DSLRs, that they’ve shot on just about any camera that’s made. Here’s the thing. Most people don’t realize is that almost any camera made in the last 3 to 5 years is also good enough to put on television, at least as a B or C camera. I know it sounds crazy. I know I’m going to make a lot of people angry by saying this, but it’s true.

Joke: Every single one of our DP’s is cringing right now.

Biagio: They all want to kill me. They don’t want to shoot me. Sorry. And listen, by the way, there’s another I can replace a great DP with a wonderful camera. But the fact of the matter is, when you’re shooting unscripted, the most important thing is to actually get the moment. So if that means you have a, you know, a $10,000 camera pointed at one scene and have to whip out your iPhone to capture an incredible moment on the other side of set. You do it and you put that on TV. Well.

Joke: Remember when we did our cage pilot, we had all these cameras running, and then you ran into the cage with a flip cam and ended up actually airing that?

Biagio: Yeah, I did. We were shooting the pilot for caged, and our guy got knocked out, and I was one of those split second things where I had to make a decision on whether or not, you know, I was going to order someone into the ring, and it just was happening so fast. I literally whipped out my flip cam. At the time, we still had flip cams, not even as good as an iPhone today. And I ran into the ring and I hopped right in there and I shot the footage. And in in retrospect, it was probably a good thing I did, because trying to rush in there with a bigger camera and get the angles I did would have been almost impossible. So the point being is, don’t stress about your camera. Now, that said, I do have a favorite camera. Me personally, and also a lot of DP’s agree with me. A lot of DP’s don’t. I love the canon C300. I don’t think you need the 4K version for most unscripted television. For me, I love it. It’s I love using the interchangeable lenses. It’s still small enough that you can kind of grab it and go, but the picture grades beautifully. So for me, I like the canon C300. What about you joke?

Joke: Well, I’m more the producer role than I can see. 300 starts weighing on my wrist, so I like the A7 s, I like, you know, the what are they called now, the W?

Biagio: Yeah. The old. It used to be the X one. Now it’s like a PM 200.

Joke: I think it’s like.

Biagio: 200. Yeah.

Joke: I mean, those are great for just great. Yeah. Verité shooting. Obviously, if you want to set up a beautiful interview, then you want to go for more the C300, but then you’re dealing with sticks and then that it doesn’t matter about the weight and the holding of the camera.

Biagio: Yeah. Most important thing. Just make sure you have a camera, even if it’s a camera on your phone. Get what you need. Don’t go broke buying a really expensive camera when you’re just starting out. More important to shoot pretty pictures with any camera than to spend a lot of money on a really good camera and shoot so-so pictures. Okay, so next up, I want to talk about casting, because casting, especially in our business, is really important. That can mean anything from looking for people to be on a show like Scream Queens, to interviewing people who own fashion boutiques because you think you might want to do a show set in a fashion boutique. I would say we have one tool we use more than any other when it comes to casting. Right. Joke. Skype. Skype? That’s right. It’s free. It’s available on any kind of computer, PC, Mac, I think even Linux. I don’t know how many of you are using an Audi PC or Mac, but the point is, it’s really easy to get. It’s really easy to show someone how to use, and you can connect with anybody, anywhere in the world.

Joke: Depending on their internet connection.

Biagio: That’s true. I will say we were recently trying to cast something that’s way out in the middle of nowhere. It was still very useful for us. The video quality was not great. I wouldn’t put that video in a pitch tape. However, we have put some, you know, some Skype video in pitch tapes that have sold in the past. So really anything goes when it comes to recording that Skype video, there’s a few ways that you can actually do it. If you’re on a mac, this may also go for PC. I just don’t know because I’m a mac guy, but QuickTime has a free screen recorder built right into it. Most people don’t even know that QuickTime. You can just go and actually record anything on your screen. So once your Skype call starting, you just go into QuickTime, hit record, bam, it’ll record your screen for free. You can also use a program like Screen Flow, which I’ve used in the past. There’s also a program you can buy for like 20 bucks called Skype Call recorder will record anything on your screen, but if you don’t have any of those or you’re in a hurry. You can also just point the camera right at your video, right at your computer screen and tape it. Because you’re doing this for casting, you want to. You want to see how they come across on camera. And to be honest, if they don’t come across well, when you’re pointing, you know, your your iPhone camera at your computer screen, they’re not going to come across great when you put them on a $20,000 camera either. So I would say, is there anything else for casting joke that I’m leaving out?

Joke: Well, you need a phone.

Biagio: Yeah. It’s good to be able to talk to people.

Joke: You know, being familiar with the internet and searching and all of that stuff. But yeah, most of the time it’s it’s following up and, and like we said, putting them on tape.

Biagio: Yeah. All right. So moving on here. The next thing that I want to talk about is writing. Now we are an unscripted television company. We do not write our shows before we shoot them. But that said, there is still a lot of writing that needs to be done. We don’t really use final draft write joke.

Joke: No, I think also think of it more as sales documents, right. That you’re writing because you’re selling to the network, either your idea in development or when you’re in series like, you know, the outline that you’re hoping to capture or just even communicating with them of the stuff that’s happening in people’s lives. So for us, writing it kind of depends what if you’re a mac or not? Mac? I mean, obviously if you’re a mac pages keynote, those are great keynotes, great for making decks. We were always using pages and keynote, and then too many of our networks were not Mac. And so they were like, we can’t open it. So then it became about PowerPoint and word.

Biagio: So yeah, we’d be grudgingly joined the Microsoft, whatever it is, pay monthly, you know, so you could have have Microsoft Word and Excel and all that stuff.

Joke: It’s a rip off. But anyway, you know, open office works fine. Like a lot of our, our, you know, our assistant and other people around the office here will use open office because you can open those documents and save them out.

Biagio: Yeah. Open office is free. Anybody can download open office. A lot of people don’t know about open office. It allows you to open word documents. I love free, free alternatives to software. I think especially when you’re starting out. Free is always great in open office is an absolutely terrific sweet of you know, it’s listen, it’s never going to be as polished as using word or using Apple’s programs. It doesn’t really matter if it gets the job done. Also Google Docs, we’ve used that before, right?

Joke: Oh yeah. So Google Docs is this huge thing here. The only thing is you got to have a Gmail address Gmail email address.

Biagio: So we think it’s not like we’re Google Power users, but I think that’s the case.

Joke: Well, each time they invite me to the Joke Productions email address, I can’t I literally this is, you know, we’re the heads of the company. Our our team sends us these invites. And then it literally says, you you are not accepted. You you’re not you’re not okay. And I’m like, what?

Biagio: For the record, I think we may just have to learn how to use Google Docs. But you may be right, you may be right.

Joke: But you just send it to a mail address, you created email address, and then boom, now you’re part of of, you know, the little thing. And the great thing about it is you can have different Google Docs for different projects so that, you know, you can leave messages there for everybody. It’s easy for everyone to keep track of everything. There’s spreadsheets, there’s word type docs. So it’s fantastic in terms of collaborating with a team.

Biagio: Yeah. And speaking of collaboration, I also want to take a second to talk about sharing. You know, a lot of times you have to share files with other people, you know, all over the country, maybe just in the next room. Me personally, I’m a huge fan of Dropbox. They have free plans which are perfectly usable for just about anything you want to do. And yes, there are. There are hyper awesome detailed platforms out there for sharing, especially stuff that’s made especially for film and video. I just don’t use any of it. I just don’t have the time to train people.

Joke: I’m glad we’re recording this.

Biagio: I know well because I was always the guy who was like, oh, we got to try this platform or oh, we got to try that platform. And honestly, I got to tell you, at the end of the day, I.

Joke: Still have Christina trying to use slack.

Biagio: I do, I do, I well, I do listen, I’m always hoping to find that one platform that just works. I got to be at the end of the day. I haven’t found anything easier or simpler than Dropbox. We use it for everything. We use it for everything. And what I think what I like most about Dropbox is I can just throw a file in the Dropbox, right click on it, and it’ll give me a link that I can mail to anybody. So, so it’s just so easy to share, like especially PDFs when you got to send them to the network or something. Yeah.

Unidentified Voice: If we have like PDFs.

Joke: We have to send in network with lots of pictures. And you know, those files tend to get really, really big, but you don’t want to degrade the pictures. And Dropbox is great. Same thing with those PowerPoints we were talking about. Right. Because those get to be very large files.

Biagio: So yeah, you just can’t you just can’t straight up email them. And especially a lot of networks have firewalls or all sorts of security, you know, things to make sure you don’t get it. So Dropbox a nice easy way to send. Also one specific aspect of sharing I want to talk about video sharing. Now a lot of people will put stuff on YouTube technically and legally. The best type of video sharing to do with the network is whatever they tell you to do. I will tell you day to day. For us, we tend to use a password protected Vimeo link. We use Vimeo plus, I think not Vimeo Pro, I think we use Vimeo Plus you can use regular Vimeo. But the great thing about Vimeo is that you can password protect the link. You can hide it from Vimeo so nobody can see it. I’m not sure if you can do that on a free plan or only on the paid plans, but they do have both, so definitely explore them. For me, Vimeo is our preferred, our preferred way of sharing video. All right, that’s everything we want to talk about today. Next time, we’re going to go into a deep dive of our post-production process and talk about everything from our editing software to 3D programs and even sound mixing. So we’ll see you in a couple of weeks with that.

Joke: Amen, Amen.

Biagio: All right. Well, that’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in. As always. If you’d like to learn how to picture shows to us, just sign up for our newsletter and follow the directions. And if you’re on Twitter, hit us up at Joakim Biagio and Biagio. That’s usually the best way to get Ahold of us these days, because I try to look at Twitter at night and in the morning. So that’s it. All right.

Unidentified Voice: We’ll see you guys talk to you in two weeks.

Biagio: See you in two weeks. By Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.