Last One Out

Brooke gets pushed over the edge.

This episode is quite a turning point in the story. Captain Annoy-o forces Brooke to do something he otherwise would never bring himself to do.

Synopsis (Spoiler Alert!)

Brooke emerges from Roxanne’s office, expecting to find that everyone else has gone home for the day. It’s only when he discovers his jacket is missing that he realizes Captain Annoy-o is still there. He borrowed Brooke’s jacket days ago. It’s okay, they’re cube buddies.

Well, it’s not okay with Brooke, and he lets the Captain have it. The Captain retaliates by revealing he has been keeping a record of the work Brooke does, or doesn’t do. For the last time Brooke actually did anything productive, the Captain has to go all the way back to May 5.

And Brooke’s had enough. There’s one sure way to distance himself from the ultra annoying Captain Annoy-o, and that is to accept Roxanne’s offer to become the new Team Leader. That way, he’ll get a double desk - the ultimate perk - and Captain Annoy-o will have to move.

And accepting Roxanne’s offer was the one thing Brooke didn’t want to do. I hope it is worth it, Brooke!

Production Notes

This is one is nice because, like episode 3, it is a much more intimate episode. In fact, there’s only two characters in it - Brooke and Captain Annoy-o.

We were very happy to have this location, it had everything we needed… everything except drawers on the desks! So the drawer that Captain Annoy-o unlocks in the scene is actually a free standing filing cabinet. It works great, if I hadn’t pointed that out to you, you probably never would have noticed. Or cared, I shouldn’t wonder.

Early in pre-production, we decided that we’d shoot Team Leader with two cameras. We knew we had to shoot fast. A big budget action movie typically shoots at a rate of a minute a day. A TV series usually shoots much faster, often around seven minutes a day. We shot upwards of twenty minutes a day. Insane.

So we wanted to use two cameras at once to capture multiple angles of the same take. There were pros and cons to doing that. Shooting digital makes it cheap, and having multiple angles of the same action makes it easier to edit. More and more shows are doing that kind of multiple camera shoot. The one that does it the best, in my opinion, is Friday Night Lights. On the con side, it doubles the things the director and DP need to take into account. At times, the cameras ended up shooting from the same angle. The other problem we ran into in post production was that each camera’s footage was a slightly different colour, meaning during the colour timing stage we had a little bit more work than if we only had one camera on each scene.

What is colour timing? Colour timing is like sound mixing for the picture. Once your footage has been edited and “locked” as they say, someone with a keen eye for colour goes through it shot by shot and adjusts the colour and exposure. They make this bit slightly darker, this other slightly lighter, slightly bluer, slightly greener… Like using a graphic equalizer on your home stereo, it just makes the picture look subtly, but noticeably, better. In fact, you would be surprised if you saw feature film footage before it had been through colour timing.

By the way, I love the way Matt Boden forces down his laugh after “I forgot to laugh” in this episode. I’m glad that we got to focus on Captain Annoy-o a little bit more in this episode than in some of the others. Sure, he’s really just there to piss Brooke off, but Matt manages to do that with style!