I stole this from another forum, I thought it was an interesting read on how the "Live Shows" are made.
So if you haven’t read up on any taping info for this season’s BBCan, the show is taped in downtown Toronto at a Lakeshore TV studio. They are using two sound stages for the show, one for the show’s FOTH set, and then a totally different stage for the actual house. My buddy and I arrived for the taping at about 4pm. We got our tickets and saw that we had floor seats (!!) just in front of Arissa. You can see the back of our heads a few times
We were lead to our seats at around 4:45pm. I’d say that most of the place filled up, but they still had plenty of seats left over for those that were waiting in the rush line. The stage manager, Sue, pointed out that if you come down on any given eviction night and wait in the rush line, you pretty much will get into the taping, they always have extra seats. Before the show started taping, Sue also spoiled that Neda was taken off the block and Kyle was put in her spot. A bunch of people gasped, as I guess she thought that everyone would have known that spoiler by now, but I guess about half of the people there didn’t know who won PoV and what happened. Neda had some of her friends in the audience, but no one else of significance was there.
The taping then started as you see on the show. The audience gets to see the same video clips as you see on TV on the garage door of the house set. For the seats that can’t see the set (those sitting right beside the set facing outwards), they erected a large screen at the back for them to watch, which wasn’t there on the first night of taping and I guess they realized they needed a way for them to see too. You can hear some of our reactions to the videos on the episode.
During the commercial break, Sue went around and asked if people had questions for her. One guy said that he thought the Divergent challenge was the best one they’ve done (not really a question…), another guy asked where the actual house was compared to the set. It’s actually about a 4 minute walk from the doors you see on the set, and the doors to the house. During the next video package, Adel and Kyle were getting a pretty good edit. The crowd was really into Jon and LOL’d at the “tool box” comment. They are giving Andrew a pretty bad edit, wow. The “outsiders” scene was also getting tons of laughs.
Then things got crazy…
During the commercial break, they were getting ready for Arisa to cut to the house and start the voting. You may notice on the show that the HGs don’t really give a big welcome to Arisa… well that’s because it was like the 7th time they tried to go live to the house! Arisa has a wireless clicker she uses to speak to the HGs in the house. They did a test to see if it worked… all was good. So they then started the live shot, and the HGs would say that Arisa was cutting in and out and couldn’t really hear. They tried again (intro speech and all), same result. They did about 4 takes, nothing doing. A bit of panic was in the air, and the directors met and thought about what to do. They thought that maybe the frequency of the wifi device was off since they were far from the actual house, or maybe that the cell phones in the audience were causing the disruptions. They decided to have Sue take the clicker and use it backstage, closer to the house, but then Arisa said that wouldn’t work because she wouldn’t know when she was live to the house or not, and what she could or couldn’t say. So they talked again and decided to use a wired clicker. They needed to test this with the HGs again, so they did and it worked! But now they needed to check to see if it would work in the Diary room too, so they hauled Kenny in there to test it out. He literally sat in the DR chair for about 10 minutes waiting… and waiting… and grooming his beard… and nothing was going through. More panic among the directors and producers, and they all met with Arisa on stage to figure out what to do. Kenny meanwhile is just sitting there and then Sue starts having a fake conversation with him on the screen which was actually quite funny. They send Kenny back, and finally they decide to get rid of the clicker, and just control the mics from backstage, and gave Arisa prompts as to when she could speak freely to the audience, and when she was live to the HGs. They brought Kenny back into the DR, tested, and it all worked! You then get to see the result of all of this on the episode. You could tell that Kyle knew he was a goner and just wanted this to end but they kept redoing it LOL.
When Kyle got evicted, they cut the taping and waited for Kyle to walk to the set. Sue looked for more questions from the audience and someone asked about Marsha the Moose. Sue said that Marsha was in a box somewhere and they couldn’t find her (the show moved sets from last year, I guess they couldn’t find that prop ha!). Apparently, the HGs could hear what Sue was saying through her mic in the house! You’ll see later in the HoH comp that there a magazine in the background saying that Marsha went to rehab LOL.
You see the magic of editing when Arisa introduces Kyle to the crowd, it was about 10 minutes later after eviction. Kyle didn’t put his bag down, it was awkward seeing him talk swinging his mini bag LOL. He said he was in rehab?? Not sure what that was about.
The HoH comp went as you see on TV. We could see that answer on Arisa’s teleprompter, so when Ika was the only one who picked “Rumour” for the 4 live chickens, we all knew she had won at that point (you can’t hear but there was a big gasp from the crowd). The crowd loved that she won, and so did I. Should stir things up quite a bit! Right before commercial, the camera pans in front of Arisa and my head is right in the bottom left corner!
Sue asked the crowd who they thought would be the #FinalHG. Nate had no support, Scott had the most, and Allison still had a lot (she was my pick, best gamer). We then see Allison get picked, sweet!
I love that we got that nice behind the scenes shot of Allison walking into the house. The crowd was laughing a lot during this. You can hear Allison say “Am I the first one here?” and then start her story of her thinking she didn’t realize they were all there. Good start to her story, she’s a gamer!
During the break between real show and side show, they do a set change where they take all of the floor seats and move them into the set, which you can then see people sitting in the background for the sideshow. There was about a 20 minutes break to get that set up, and people had a pee break. I bet a ton of spoiler info was then tweeted in that break.
Arisa is AMAZING off camera. She was chatting it up with the crowd, talking strategy and decision making. You can tell she actually watches and follows the show and is really into it. We actually got to watch Allison talk with the HGs during the set change, and she was very careful to stay with the main group. There were splinter groups going off though, and they all were talking about how she must be some weird twist, and to test her story out from all angles.
The Sideshow went just like you saw on TV. The only thing I noticed was that I think they decided last minute to tell Kyle about the #FinalHG twist. Originally they had Kyle leave the set for the last segment, but then they brought him back and surprised him about Allison.
Lastly, after the Sideshow ended, they actually filmed one last segment… they gathered the HGs again in the living room, with Allison, and told them all that she HAS IMMUNITY for the week, and won’t compete in the Veto comp. I think they wanted that in the actual show, but it might get edited into the show on Sunday. Spoiler alert, I guess
That was it, fun night! A great season is in the works for sure!
