kidattypewriter

Friday, October 13, 2006

The Show And Me Just Happened To Bump Into One Another

I don't normally watch David Tench Tonight, but let's just say the show and me happened to bump into one another last night. Tench is an animated interviewer, literally: kind of a mix of Troy McLure and Kent Brockman. I'm not sure how the animators get him to look so convincing; I guess they get the people being interviewed to sit in the studio alone while the actor behind David Tench asks them a couple of basic questions, and they add all the Tench jokes and reaction shots in afterwards. It's a bit of a puzzler. Anyway, last night Tench was interviewing once-was-a-comedy-star, Mick Molloy, about upcoming movie Boyztown. It's an Aussie film about a 1980s boy band who get back together to form a 2006 boy band.

It took me a few moments to get all this straight in my head. A fake cartoon character performing a pre-prepared interview with a once-was-comedy star about a fictional film which is about that most contrived of musical institutions, the boy band.

Somehow, I don't think the entertainment industry is quite familiar with this whole thing called 'reality' ...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The show and I ... tut tut

Caz said...

Tim - no, the team behind the animation have actually devised real time real interaction between the animation and the guests. Damned clever. So it's not some contrived and lengthy edit job behind the scenes to add-in the David Tench character with the real people.

TimT said...

We-ell, I guess it's possible if they have some computer real-time modelling of the David Tench actor, if you get my drift. But there's a lot of opportunity for adding stuff in - there's jump cuts, and that sort of thing. And there was also a contrived 'phone in' section, and a joke about David Tench's 'stalker' in the 'audience'. (The only 'audience' shot in the whole show, in fact).

Caz said...

Yerrrs, not suggesting there's no editing, that would be plain silly, nor that the show itself is "live" or "real time", only that the Tench character doesn't have a human stand-in asking the questions, with the animation added later. I still think it's very clever, technically. Doesn't compel me to watch it though. Haven't seen more than a few minutes of the show, plus the ads.

TimT said...

I thought that mabye this was originally a Comedy Channel thing, imported from America, but apparently it's home born. Which makes it even stranger - an Australian comedy show in which the main character is an animated American? I can appreciate David Letterman as much as the next guy, but why invent an American host for a purely Australian show? That joke doesn't seem quite right to me.

Maybe that means I'm racist!

Caz said...

Andrew Denton is the master mind (?) behind the show Tim.

So, yes, entirely home grown, including the animation company - same guys who worked on Lord of the Rings, I think, or some other big Hollywood film. Lot of Oz companies doing beaut things in film animation and computer generated special effects.

Email: timhtrain - at - yahoo.com.au

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