The Presentation

The Buck Stops Here

The future of the company is on the line…

Synopsis (Spoiler Alert!)

The Martin-Wells team has assembled in the Connectrixx board room to see how what they got for their money over the last year. Agnes Martin-Wells, aged Matriarch of the company, complains that it is as cold in their as last year.

Roxanne calls for the presentation to begin…

Right from the start, Roxanne and the visiting clients are a bit taken aback, as Brooke, Alice and Reggie launch into a skit featuring two joggers who are whisked back in time by the Ghost of Quarterlies Past. The special effects include rapid flickering of the lights.

Later, a war scene is being acted out. The assembled audience doesn’t seem to take too well to “Sargent” Brooke screaming at them about traditional oral care buying habits.

But by the time Reggie arrives as the dying true love to Alice’s tooth-brush-forgetting newlywed, they have everyone in that board room hooked. Everyone including Trevor, a handsome Martin-Wells guy who can not hey his eyes off Alice. She becomes so flustered she screws up a lightning cue.

The Martin-Wells people are loving it as Brooke starts to wrap it up… but that’s when one of them notices the stain on Brooke’s shirt. Suddenly, the spell is broken. As Brooke desperately tries to get his audience back, Trevor idly flips through the report…

Right away he spots it. This is the same report as last year. The years go from ’04 to ’06, the page numbers go from 04 to 06. “Did you just use a global search and replace?”

Brooke denies it, but that’s that. The meeting is over. As Roxanne begs them not to fire her company, Alice steals aside to flirt with Trevor. Brooke sees her making time with this “suit,” and explodes… reading his fate with one last inappropriate epithet.

There’s a lot to say about this episode. It’s the longest by far. Even without the credits it would still be our longest episode. We figured instead of cutting some of the presentation, we’d let it go long. Consider it your reward for watching it until the end.

This was the very first thing we shot. It was so exciting, but still stressful. Some on our crew were working on a film set for the very first time. Notably our sound crew, but also our Continuity Person. (Those are always two of the hardest positions to fill on a low budget shoot. They’re not glamorous crew positrons like camera and lighting, but they both involve a level of skill that’s hard to pick up very quickly.) To make matters worse, we were shooting in a relatively small space filled with people, plus one very loud video projector. A very challenging environment to light, shoot and record good clean sound in.

Few people realize the amount of work that goes into the sound of a film or series. First of all, on location the only sound you want to record is the actor’s voices. Footsteps, traffic, the rustling of clothing, all that stuff is stripped out of the track by the dialogue editors. It is then painfully recreated and re-recorded by the famous Foley Artists. And then there’s the sound effects, and the mixing session… hours and hours of work on even the smallest project.

On our limited budget, we couldn’t afford to do foley, but we did do sound effects in some surprising places. One of them is the phone sounds during Heart to Heart (Episode 8). None of those sounds were recorded during the filming.

Another layer of effort is A.D.R., or Addition Dialogue Recording. Sometimes the recording made on the set isn’t good enough. In that case you bung the actor into a studio and rerecord the dialogue – in dead sync to the moving lips in the picture. Not easy.

This is the only episode were we see the very talented performers who make the delegates from Martin-Wells. Although they only had a few lines in this episode, we would eagerly work with them again. Trevor, played by Justin Sharratt, would have a big part to play if ever we would do any more Team Leader stories.