Pinoy big Brother
...xtra camera corridor right into the middle of the main area, dividing the kitchen from the living room, they would be able to get much closer to the action. "The coverage was improved in other ways too", says Big Brother Production Executive, Howard Parker. Ten more cameras were fitted into this house than in series one. In the first series, if a housemate moved a piece of furniture, it sometimes resulted in a blind-spot. Big Brother would then have to intervene and tell the housemate to move the furniture back. This time, there are more cameras and, says Howard; "the housemates have pretty well resigned themselves to the fact that they can't get out of shot." the mirrors If you've seen the show, you'll know that the walls of the Big Brother House are covered in mirrors. Lots of mirrors! They're one-way mirrors, allowing the cameras to spy on the housemates but preventing the housemates from seeing the cameras. There's nothing magical about a one-way mirror. It's just a normal mirror with a thinner than usual layer of shiny silver paint. A normal mirror is made by painting silver paint onto the back of a sheet of glass. Light travels through the glass and bounces off the silver and back to your eyes. In a one-way mirror the paint is thin so that some light can get through. To use the mirror, it is placed between two rooms. On one side, where the housemates are, the area is well lit. Lots of light from this side reaches the mirror. Most of the light is reflected, but some passes through and is picked up by the cameras. On the other side, where the cameras are, it's almost dark. Some light travels through the mirror, but the small amount of light from the camera side is swamped by the huge amount of reflected light from the bright side. As far as the housemates are concerned, if they stare at the mirrors all they can see are their own reflections. Interestingly not every mirror in the Big Brother house hides a camera, or even a camera corridor. In order to enhance the illusion of watchfulness, the producers decided to put mirrors wherever a camera could go ... even if there isn't one there. oops, spot the camera operator Now that you know how one-way mirrors work, you can also start to see why they cause the film crew continuous headaches. If a camera corridor becomes well lit for any reason, everything inside it is instantly visible! The garden is the most problematic area. In the morning, sunlight streams in from the east. By evening the light comes from the west. If a camera operator moves so that a shaft of sunlight falls onto his or her hand, the hand becomes instantly visible to those on the other side of the glass. To try to reduce reflections, the walls of the corridors are black and the cameras and the pedestals are covered in black material. To hide the camera crew, there are black curtains between them and the glass. The operators have to work their cameras from behind the curtains! the sound The audience doesn't just see the housemates, they also hear them. Housemates wear microphones on cords hanging around their necks. These "radio mikes" work by converting the sound into radio waves and then beaming them to a receiver in the sound control room. There the radio waves are changed back into sound and recorded. Radio mikes are great becuase they are portable. They are powered by batteries and, as they send the signal by radio, they don't require the wearer to be wire to the walls. But any microphone can fail, and a microphone on a string can always be taken off. So to make sure the audience doesn't miss a word, there are also more than 20 fixed microphones around the house and 16 hidden "surveillance" microphones (including a few behnd the bedheads in the bedrooms!). These microphones send the sound as an electrical signal through a wire. In the sound control room, the sounds from all these different microphones are "faded up" and "faded down" to produce a seamless show. Perhaps if you're a compulsive viewer, you've been too engrossed in the conversations to ...