Traci Hahn, Associate Producer Says...

Posted by on 15 January 2010 | 0 Comments

“Hey, I have an idea, let’s do a green reality show” says Suzanne.  That’s literally how it all started.

Everyone seemed to think it was a great idea.  I was somewhat skeptical.

After a few minor bumps, like both original families and one coach bailing out at the last minute, we got up and going with the families and coaches that you see on the show now.

Suzanne made the decision to shoot the show in High Definition which meant a new process for us.  Instead of shooting onto tape, we were now shooting straight to a special hard drive, called a firestore,.  After every shoot we copied the footage from the firestore onto a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) hard drive and then backed that footage up onto another terabyte drive, cleared the firestore and went back out.  After all the shooting was complete, I think we ended up with about 11 terabytes of raw footage, that’s 11,000 gigs of footage.

We were running pretty crazy during the actual shooting of the show.  Even though I knew the families were willing participants, it still felt awkward, at times, invading their space.  Audio was a constant challenge.  Suzanne even resorted to stealing from the children. (It was a kazoo and she did eventually give it back.)

While we were shooting the show, we were going so fast that we really didn’t have time to start any of the editing so when we finally got to it, it was daunting.  How to organize and cut down 11,000 gigs of footage into six - 1/2 hour episodes (We ended up extending it to 9 episodes part way through the editing).  It took us a lot longer than we thought it would.

I can’t finish this blog without saying how much fun it was to work with all the people involved with this show.  Even though it, definitely, had it’s stressful times, we really did laugh a lot.

Traci