To sum up where we're at (in terms of the Behind-the-Scenes blog anyway), it's sunday night. We've just shot the Halloween, Office-wear and Christmas special episodes of TopGunge.com. The girls have cleaned off and gone home. The props are waiting to be cleaned (including three stools, four chairs, three tables, the walls, the floor, three gunge barrels in the ceiling, the top of the GungeTankGirls Gunge tank which we also hung from the ceiling for Halloween and the gunge bowl itself). I'm sat on over eight hours of raw footage from three different cameras (as well as some photos you can see on the previous blog entries) and now the boring bit begins!

It's either clean things or edit video....both are long-winded, time consuming and not that exciting, but prioritising editing means (i) I stay dry and (ii) I get to look at pretty girls being gunged! A lot. Slowly. Frame by frame a lot of the time, as I sync two, and at times three cameras. Don't want to give away all our secrets, but I use an editing method basically taught to me by Leon and then tweaked and perfected by me over the last few years. In general for TopGunge we try to film one of two ways - either one camera wide and one doing close-ups, or what I think (in the trade) is called cross-coverage. The basic idea is that if either camera starts shaking or is pointing at the ceiling or whatever, I can always cut to the other one in the edit......it's a nice theory, that works most of the time! In general the only problem is when something funny or stupid happens, because you get camera-shake on both views as the cameramen are laughing - as a viewer you'll just have to put up with that!

As mentioned in previous blogs, TopGunge is mostly shot 'as-live' (only stopping between the five major scenes and occasionally to refill something that's poised above someone's head!) So I normally pick the wide camera to start and then chop to the close-up camera for specific gungings and close-ups as we go through. Then you have to add in the bits shot between scenes of the girls mucking around in the mess, remember to check the soundtrack for things people shouldn't be saying, and add in the music and titles. And then you've got one hour 12 minutes of edited footage that you leave to render overnight and in the morning you've got an episode of Top Gunge! Well, you still have to chop it, re-render it into two levels of quality, do the screengrabs and preview pics, edit the trailer for Youtube (it's also available as a free download from the site in case you've not noticed that) and THEN you have an episode of Top Gunge!

Oh and of course, for Halloween I had to write a rhyme as part of the description. Google is your friend for tasks like this, as well as an ability to not worry too much about poetry niceties! And there you have it! From preparation to completion, how to make an episode of Top Gunge....well, there are lots of things I've not mentioned and loads of things that happen and I've forgotten, but that's the basics anyway...I personally would love feedback on this blog, leave a comment or a question below! And once more thanks to Leon, Lisa, Meg, Jonny, Chris, all the girls and of course you guys for buying the episodes!

Big Dave