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Reader SurveyBusting Reality
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
MythBusters has reinvented the wheel for reality television production—busted, plausible, or confirmed?
Can diving underwater save a person from gunfire? Can a penny dropped from a tall building kill someone on the ground? Can an unaided human voice shatter glass? Perhaps you already know the answers to these questions. If so, you've probably been watching MythBusters, the addictively fun and successful show on the Discovery Channel.
Well into its fifth season of production, MythBusters has not run out of fun urban myths to test, and it has become more visually savvy while streamlining its production. Can we confirm this? Absolutely.
“Because we're often tackling conspiracy theories, it was very important that we never appeared as though we were in bed with the man,” says Dan Tapster, executive producer of the show from Beyond Productions, located in Sydney, Australia. “So, in designing that, we felt it was important to keep a slightly guerilla feel to the filmmaking. We'd absolutely make sure that the production values were as high as possible in terms of the format we're filming on and everything, but we're happy for it to have a kind of rough-around-the-edges feel. We're happy to get the crew in shot. We're happy for the cameramen to do big crash zooms and things.”
Still, MythBusters has come a long way from its first season of only three episodes — all shot on MiniDV. Tapster says he considers that season the pilot. After its rather immediate success, the crew moved on to Digi Beta for season two, but the second-unit cameras were still MiniDVs. Near the end of season four, with episode 70, the team upgraded to HD with the Sony PDW-F355 XDCAM HD and a Sony HVR-Z1U. The change has made a big difference in the show's production pipeline.
“Our show is not a polished-looking show,” says DP Peter Heap, who has been on the show since 2004. “We don't spend a lot of time lighting things. We use available light, almost exclusively. For us, it was more about having a robust workhorse rather than getting a camera that was top of the line like an [HDW-F900]. We did look at some HD cameras. The [HDW-750] we looked at, but it really came down to price.”
MythBusters DP Peter Heap uses a Sony PDW-F355 XDCAM HD and an HVR-Z1U for the show's newly upgraded HD pipeline.
“The production of the current series started September of last year, and that was when we made the switch to HD,” Tapster says. “One of the things we found with the cameras we are using is that they actually make postproduction a lot more efficient. The Sony HD XDs have a system of proxy files. So, previously, when we were on Digi, when the tape arrived at post [from San Francisco to Australia], someone would have to manually digitize. But now, because we can use these proxy files, it means that we have an hour's worth of footage that can be got into the Avid in about 5 minutes.”
“There are some other advantages in going with the disk-based system,” Heap says. “Our production company is an Australian production company. Every Friday, we ship tapes back to Australia. There were some times when they needed the tapes or disks sooner than that, and we would ship them on Wednesday, but they don't get them until Friday. With the HDCAM system, we can send them via the Internet from the files by FTP. … That means that instead of getting them in a number of days, they can get them in a few hours. And in any production, that's a bonus.”
“Also, because we're running four cutting rooms, we often have a situation where all editors and writers are saying, ‘Me, me, me, me!’” Tapster says. “They need their rushes as quickly as possible, and in the past, there was always this backlog, and part of my role was to identify who did need their rushes as soon as possible — which is often a kind of no-win situation. But now we don't have that problem because of this proxy file setup. That makes the whole thing work very smoothly.”
