BBAU 2025 house in Dreamworld Exhibition Centre

[dasnico]

I feel like most of the control room will be remote if it’s only hot head cameras being used, it significantly eases their on-site operations.

There may be a small amount of staff on site to action things immediately and provide ongoing maintenance for production but it would not surprise me if the show was being edited out of Sydney with footage being stored on the cloud.

Mm. Unlikely. That’s a significant amount of data for a 24/7 show with many audio and HD video feeds, let alone comms feeds. The production facilities will be at dreamworld again. Don’t forget the Banijay job postings for Queensland for big brother. It also adds a lot of risk if their [insanely fast] internet connection drops. Even with the fastest internet, control commands to the cameras would feature a significant delay over the World Wide Web.

 

[andrewpatrick_]

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Reallyyyyy not a fan of no roof

 

[BB12]

I feel like most of the control room will be remote if it’s only hot head cameras being used, it significantly eases their on-site operations.

There may be a small amount of staff on site to action things immediately and provide ongoing maintenance for production but it would not surprise me if the show was being edited out of Sydney with footage being stored on the cloud.

I would imagine it would be a full crew on site.

Big Brother is back in Queensland | Screen Queensland

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM NETWORK 10 Image: Host Mel Tracina at the Gold Coast’s Dreamworld, the home of Big Brother (courtesy Network 10) A brand-new house, back where it all began. Direct from the diary…

screenqueensland.com.au

Jacqui Feeney, Screen Queensland CEO, said: “Endemol Shine Australia’s Big Brother has been an important training ground for many local screen practitioners and this new iteration will employ 95 crew as well as supporting four paid attachment positions.

 

[Matty492]

Anyone know what these are used for?
would make sense for them use the full space (if not already used for something else). Block the street off at the top and use the space for control rooms, production offices, dressing rooms, storage for tasks, etc.
Nice and close to the house, Stage and car park.

 

[kamui]

Mm. Unlikely. That’s a significant amount of data for a 24/7 show with many audio and HD video feeds, let alone comms feeds.

I don't doubt the production facilities being at Dreamworld. Unlike the behind-the-mirror stuff, I think the host in the control room is a defining look for Big Brother Australia. I totally expect to see Mel in the actual control room.

But generally speaking, remote editing is not out of the question. When Endemol rolled out a new production system based on the Microsoft Azure cloud a couple of years ago, they touted how controlling and editing can now be done completely remotely. So the technology would be there and it absolutely makes sense as well to have at least some of the work done remotely..

I would also expect Endemol to edit the shows remotely, especially based on comments like these:

I would imagine it would be a full crew on site.

Big Brother is back in Queensland | Screen Queensland

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM NETWORK 10 Image: Host Mel Tracina at the Gold Coast’s Dreamworld, the home of Big Brother (courtesy Network 10) A brand-new house, back where it all began. Direct from the diary…

screenqueensland.com.au

Jacqui Feeney, Screen Queensland CEO, said: “Endemol Shine Australia’s Big Brother has been an important training ground for many local screen practitioners and this new iteration will employ 95 crew as well as supporting four paid attachment positions.

Less than 100 people working on the show is not a lot. There are usually way more people involved. They've employed more than 300 people during the final season on Nine.

I'd take this as indication that there won't be much editing and post production done at Dreamworld.

 

[dasnico]

True but I have no doubt that production is significantly scaled back from what it used to be. I’m sure some stuff is being handled remotely but I’m positive the thick of production will be handled on site if only due to the sheer quantity of footage alone.

 

[kamui]

True but I have no doubt that production is significantly scaled back from what it used to be

I'm not so sure about that...

I've just went back and tried to count all the names that were listed in the credits for this year's Celebrity Big Brother in Germany, which runs for 17 days* and included every single person that worked on the show in some capacity. I've counted 388 names and did not count the names listed as "With thanks to", which would have taken the number over 400.

It also doesn't include third party for catering or security (because those were only companies listed), but it does include a few people who were credited for being CEO of the production company or the TV channel. Some of them were involved in construction of the set and probably didn't work for the show for its full run. But I don't think I can exclude so many positions that the number would actually be below 100.

And for comparison: I also tried and count the names listed on ITV's version. There are around 200 people listed in the credits of one of the daily shows. I haven't compared the names to other daily shows and don't know if it they just list all editors etc. that worked on this specific episode or on the daily in general. But the 200 does not include people working on Late & Live or the eviction shows as it doesn't list AJ, Will or any styling crew etc.

And I have not counted the names for those shows, but sources say 350 people working on Australian Survivor and Julia Morris claimed 500 people working on I'm a Celebrity. So I really can't see Big Brother do it with less than 100. Otherwise, they might want to sell their knowledge on how to do that to TV execs around the world that would then likely overpay for their versions.

(* you could probably make it 20 days, if you include the influencer web edition that run for 3 days shortly afterwards and probably used some members of the same team)

I’m positive the thick of production will be handled on site if only due to the sheer quantity of footage alone.

There are lots of shows that handle the whole "film there, edit it somewhere else later" just fine. You log things and you use AI to help you track things down. It's not that complicated. And it's really not that hard to access data in the cloud. It's not even that much of a ridiculous amount of data saved. I know from several other versions in Europe and North America that they don't record the footage from all cameras but just a few... and then they use separate, somewhat pre-selected recordings to put the show together and only go back to the "full" archive if necessary.

While I haven't read anything in that regards about the Australian production, I highly doubt that they'll do it completely differently from their European and American counterparts.

 

[dasnico]

No, it’s not completely out of the question for some remote work to happen. Many reality shows shoot and air after the fact. These types of live shows require post production to start while footage is coming in live to allow for a <24hr turnaround. Big Brother is typically following two stories at any time and there’s a story producer for each one who creates notes and flags content for editing. No, all cameras are not recording. The recording follows the two stories being followed. There is a shader/PTZ operator for each story. A vision mixer decides which specific cameras will be recorded. It would be a massive undertaking to have 20, 30, 40 cameras routed remotely back to a control room, say in Sydney.

Again, just from my experience in reality tv, including the one I’m sitting in the control room of right now, the footage is monitored, captured and produced on site. We have two control rooms to accommodate this team. This particular show isn’t “live” so they send hard drives back each morning to be ingested to their editing software and rough cuts are typically available in about one week. At no point is anything access via the cloud, at least at this point. The only time the cloud is ever a thing is for remote editors and story producers while in post production - something the live BB format has an extremely minimal amount of time for.

Imo, BB is too fast paced for such remote work to even be feasible. I cannot attest to how many crew members will actually be working on this reboot so we’re only assuming at this point how many crew will be on it. The comment on ~90 local crew being hired probably isn’t accounting for people being flown in or departments that would otherwise be a second thought to most.

But hey, as long as the show gets made.

 

[kamui]

It would be a massive undertaking to have 20, 30, 40 cameras routed remotely back to a control room, say in Sydney.

Just to be clear: I don't expect the control room to be in Sydney. I fully expect that to be at Dreamworld, where it will eventually be used as a set in some way or another.

But anything picked up in the control room is what I expect will be uploaded to the cloud and then edited from wherever.

 

[kamui]

Imo, BB is too fast paced for such remote work to even be feasible.

Did some more research on the feasability department to see how much was done remotely on Big Brother so far.. and the most interesting has been Italy, where production used to be a bit spread out (and the studios used to be further away from the house than Movie World is away from Dreamworld). But then I came across ITV which produced both the UK and the US version remotely at one point. The UK version had production in Spain, but two control rooms in the UK, operated all cameras from the UK, had 64 video feeds and 16 record streams (the most record streams that I've read about for BB was 8, but that depends on the country.). The US version was filmed in Hawaii, but all the controlling and editing was done in LA, with n 18-hour turnaround, with some of the logging apparently also being done in Sydney.

And again, I'm expecting the BB control room to be on site.. but if Love Island can do it, I don't see how it wouldn't be feasible for Big Brother.

 

[Brekkie]

Exactly. When everything goes through the cloud anyway makes no sense to build a production village next to the house when you've existing facilities in place. Nowadays "Big Brother" doesn't even need to leave his bed to speak to the house.

 

[dasnico]

Did some more research on the feasability department to see how much was done remotely on Big Brother so far.. and the most interesting has been Italy, where production used to be a bit spread out (and the studios used to be further away from the house than Movie World is away from Dreamworld). But then I came across ITV which produced both the UK and the US version remotely at one point. The UK version had production in Spain, but two control rooms in the UK, operated all cameras from the UK, had 64 video feeds and 16 record streams (the most record streams that I've read about for BB was 8, but that depends on the country.). The US version was filmed in Hawaii, but all the controlling and editing was done in LA, with n 18-hour turnaround, with some of the logging apparently also being done in Sydney.

And again, I'm expecting the BB control room to be on site.. but if Love Island can do it, I don't see how it wouldn't be feasible for Big Brother.

Very interesting. In all my years doing similar shows I've never experienced this, and some of them have budgets in the multi millions. That being said, one of the perks of the job is always getting to travel to (sometimes) exotic locations. I'm assuming you're referring to Love Island and not BB specifically. Interestingly enough I worked with ITV America/CBS on Love Island USA that films in Fiji now. Their entire operation was in Fiji by the compound and "tape mules" were used to fly footage drives back and fourth to LA. I can only imagine the high gigabit fibre infrastructure required, not to mention the cost, to network that back to a control room miles and miles and in some cases thousands of miles away, in the case of Hawaii <> LA.

I really don't know why BB would be returning to Dreamworld and not have their facilities there. Regardless, the job postings for the show were for the Gold Coast. Maybe the ~90 jobs mentioned were for local hires. Perhaps it'll be revealed how they're making this particular season once it kicks off. However, my money is on them producing it in it's entirely at Dreamworld.