We had a chat on the set of the daily quiz ‘De Dag Van Vandaag‘ with Production Assistant Nele Van Campenhout.
Could you describe what you do?
I’m a production assistant. It’s a bit different for every program but usually this means I ‘cue’ camera people so they take the right shots. I take care of all the ‘cues’ during a television broadcast: starting clips, starting graphics, change of lights, change of cameras, fine-tuning clips, communication with the gallery, preparing the rundowns,… I basically prepare everything that has to come on screen.
How do you cope with stress?
I’m not really a stress-case so that’s fine. With bigger shows it happens that I stress but for me that’s ‘healthy’ stress. I thrive on that.
What’s the concept of the daily quiz ‘De Dag Van Vandaag’?
‘De Dag Van Vandaag’ is about everything that happened today. So they discuss fun facts that you saw in the news or read in the newspaper. Questions about such topics through which the audience at home can eventually win a specific sum of money without doing anything.
So Fien Germijns shows up in a random living room live on television of people that won the money.
From Monday to Thursday we do the show. The first four rounds we record beforehand, and we broadcast it through the gallery. We then jump in live and that’s always a bit scary: “Where will we end up?”, because Fien just ‘invades’ a living room somewhere, and it’s always uncertain. “Will they open up?”, “Is it fun?”, “Will the connection work?”,… That part is always a bit thrilling.
What’s your workflow?
I don’t do this every day, I alternate with my colleague. But I handle this program day per day. So I don’t need to prepare anything beforehand because the production team starts in the morning and by the time I arrive they have a scenario. So I can’t really prepare much as it’s about the day itself.
My workflow is the following: I arrive, I go through the script, I check the media, then we go through the script with the presenter and the technical team, then there’s breaks such as now and later we have the prerecording of all the rounds before the finale. And then we go live so this program is pretty chill for me.
What’s your experience with TinkerList?
Oh that’s different for every production but what makes it easier for me in comparison with the past, is that I have the latest version of the script at all times.
Back in the day, you constantly had to ask new versions through mail or Google Drive. But in TinkerList, I am updated real-time so we got one document both for the creative production team as for the people in the gallery. I can add my own column with notes, which is a much nicer way of working.
No more endlessly new versions, I work paperless anyways. We just make notes online. I used to repeatedly reprint and redistribute new versions… So if you compare that to our current workflow it’s an absolute relief. I find the paperless aspect of media amazing in general.
What’s your experience with our TinkerList Showtimer app?
Until now it worked perfectly! But when I started using it for ‘De Dag Van Vandaag’, it had been a long time since I used it, and I’ve already told Erik, I have to register every time all over again, I’ll show you. Very weird!
[Sebastiaan] Sorry I’m responsible to fix this, I will do that right away!Ah you are the ‘fixer’! Yeah it’s just weird because every time I want to quickly open the app I have to register and put all my rounds in there again. Besides that it works perfectly.
But what I miss, and I have already experienced this a couple of times, is a countdown in the app. So there are advantages but there are some missing features in my personal opinion. I’m not saying this is the case for everyone.