No Time To Waste!

Creative COW by Dylan Reeve

Shortland Street is a show that's difficult to put into perspective for anyone outside of New Zealand. It airs five nights a week in prime time on the country's most watched channel, TV 2, and has an immense social influence: something like 95% of people over 14 have watched the show at some point, and it regularly achieves a 50 share. The show's reach is unmatched.

It's produced by South Pacific Pictures, best known internationally for Whale Rider, and who also produce many other shows and features -- but nothing else on the scale of five nights a week. At the beginning of 2011, we took all post in-house, where I serve as both Post Production Supervisor and finishing editor.

The show is shot in a 3-camera studio style, and we use an EditShare Geevs multi-channel recorder to capture the line cut and up to three iso channels, directly to Avid DNxHD 185. We make 250 episodes a year in 49 weeks, just over five episodes a week, every week.

Shooting and post generally runs about eight weeks ahead of air, on a bit of a complicated schedule. Here's how one episode works over a two-week cycle. It begins with two days of location shooting, Monday and Wednesday in what we could call Week One. The studio shoot for that episode begins on Tuesday of Week Two. On the Monday of Week Two, we begin to edit location footage from Week One, and on Tuesdays we start cutting that day's studio footage. By Friday of Week Two, we are typically cutting footage shot the same morning. read more...