I started on the new look for the NSWRFC site today, here is a wireframe of the front page:



It still needs a heap of work: like photos, textures, 3D elements, the menu system etc, but its a start. The other thing that is under construction is a massive link list with over 500 useful entries. If anyone would like to PM me some more links to good but hard to find sites, that would be really helpful. If you would like to get your bot your bot featured in the banner's background, send me a JPEG.

Edit: Had a bit more of a think about it; the grey areas would look good as brushed steel and the orange highlights will get a 3D glass look

You know, theres a free TV channel in Sydney that accepts any TV show from anybody (as long as you own the rights to it) and if they are any good they publicly show them on TV. Its TVS.

I knew an artist that put a painting show on there every week to help his business and his small art classes went from 1-2 people a week to a few hundred lining up at his art classes for training.

Maybe thats something that could be looked at? As far as I can see, all it would take would be some good camera work, commentary and some exciting bots (and decent editing).

You could even run a how to kind of thing along with the fights etc etc...

What sort of picture quality do they want? The best we can do is HD on typical consumer cameras.

http://www.tvs.org.au/get-involved/for-program-makers
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

Are you planning a one-off show or multiple episodes?
How many fights (interesting and reliable, not break downs) do you need per show?
How many fights are there in an average competition? Of those fights how many are interesting?
Do you have sets? Pits in a backyard would come across as amateurish

If you have seen Battlebots you would notice that only about 20% of the fights made it to air. In season 5.0 even though Voltronic was in the final only 1 of its fights was shown on tv. All the rest were cut out because they weren't interesting to watch and viewers would tune out. Robot Wars corrected this by adding house robots to liven things up if the fights were boring, when robots broke down or were too slow the reliable house robots would move in to make it more fun to watch, but this was unfair on the builders.
If you want a tv show you'd need to cut out the boring fights. You'd need to excepted at least 50% of the fights to be boring if you are not a builder. You'd need 6 - 8 fights for an hour long show, so that's at least 12 - 16 fights at the competition. If a competition was round robin with 3 rounds and 4 robots into a semi final at the end you would need 8 robots to get 15 fights. A single elimination competition would need 8 robots if you show every fight and 16 if you show 50%. And that is just a single one hour show.
The biggest competitions in Australia at the moment are lucky to get 16 robots to turn up. Last years BattleShed only managed 11

I have been thinking/planning to do something for TV/torrent syndication for a while now. I don't think we have the capacity to make any form of series with the robots in Australia atm.

There is not really enough robots and we don't meet often enough IMO. What I was thinking was more of a documentary style show depicting it as more of an underground competition. Makes it easy to get away with a lot more stuff than if you are trying to make a proper TV series.

My brother is pretty setup to do all editing for shows if we want somebody to produce it. He did the videos for the QRSC from The Edge events which looked ok even though I told him just to do it quickly so we could get them up. We should be able to get a copy of the footage from The Edge however I am not sure what the licensing would be for that.

However I reckon if we wanted to do a mini-robotwars show (need better name here) I reckon we could film the antweight fights and do interviews and stuff and get enough interesting fights to make a 22min pilot if we really wanted.
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Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

OK, let's maybe focus on some positive ideas, rather than moaning about how it can't be done? For starters, Battlebots is completely unrealistic and out of reach anywhere in the world right now - I was thinking of a 10 to 15 minute length and the make it very much a reality type 'no sets' show. We would have to tart up the arena, but if we concentrated on beetles and used our proposed new arena, then we could take it to a good or at least unusual venue, more like what Marto suggested.

As I see it frequency is our major problem; we would need to hold some extra events and save up footage before releasing a "season".

Using beetleweights will mean some close-up photography, but also makes multiple and overhead camera positions easy and lighting is also cheaper & easier.

If we are going for more of a reality format or just need lots of footage, perhaps we fit out some builders with Gopro cameras?

Well lets say we focus on a pilot from the small scale ones. If you guys from NSW can document your next beetle event I will try and do the same for our antweight event.

I think we should come up with a fairly standard format and a name if we want to do this. We would also need a bit of a bio about each of the robots and stuff. I think to make it worthwhile we would need at least 8 robots which I think we should be able to make.

I can probably organise 2x High Def cameras to film it. I can also rebuild my Bot Cam robot. If Daniel can bring his high speed camera then I think we should be pretty set. I may also mount my 720P handheld one inside the arena up the top for another view.
Anthony would probably be willing to is going to film, produce & edit although you can expect promos for his film company and his name in most of the credits as he is trying to get his name out there a little.

This could work well if we have a standard format as we can then jump from QLD event to NSW event if we wanted to run a weekly series. If you guys want me to organise this I can work out a basic show format with him and see exactly what footage we will probably need then try and produce something at our next Antweight event.

Steve
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Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

I know, I'm full of brilliant ideas....!

The thing you have to consider is that with TV, nobody is going to front up with a crap bot, especially if it is going to be on TV and theres the remote opportunity for sponsorship. Its against the advertising policies of TVS, but who's to say what stickers/bot colours/t-shirts people can wear?

It also opens the door for sales promotions and sponsors who have money and want their logo's on good bots, which means more fights more often. And who wants to sponsor a wedge? I'd rather look at action bots like demon etc... Heck, everyone would want to sponsor demon...

With the qty of fights in VIC, NSW and QLD and the good camera work of some of you, theres going to be enough footage to have a decent show at least once a fortnight. You have to remember the minimum it has to be is 22 minutes, so it doesn't have to all be about robot fights, you could also include interviews with the builders, between fights and possibly a how to section showing people how they can scrounge bits to make their first bots...

Once you show on TV, you'll start to get more people because word will spread quickly. On top of that, brett can get off his backside and post the show on the front page of the website to promote things further on the internet.

Just need someone with a deep voice that can overdub the fights and have a few awesome sounding metallic thumps when bots collide... nobody wants to hear little bumps they want to hear grinding and whatnot... all easily editable and add-able (thats not even a word)...

You could even build a few staged fights, with bots that destruct on impact... etc etc etc

I also think theres a reason that beetle weights were never televised. Can you say booring? Anybody has the capacity to make a bot of any size, thats a fact, but not everybody has the will to do it.

But you get my gist... The more exciting you make it, the more people will want to be a part of it. If kids want to do it, then great, that gets parents involved. You could also have a bit of an introduction to each bot... show what they can do to old household appliances and what not...

Opinions on my awesome ideas?

@ Bytrapper Not really a new idea. Been having the discussion with my brother on how to make something into TV worthy program for a while. However TVS is a good find, I talked to the edge about bris 31 week or two ago and they said you are expected to pay if you want to put content on there.

Just not sure how we will go getting it televised and the amount of work taken to put something like this together like this on a fortnightly basis for free would be pretty epic. For 22min you are probably looking at 100hrs+ of editing first time round. Maybe bit less second time but if you want to do it properly you can't just whip it together in one night. You also have to remember that footage is not something which magically appears. The footage of the fights from QRSC edge event took a couple of attempts to dump and was ~60Gb in Raw format. (That was ~3hrs from one camera) Getting that to a central location of a consistent quality and format is a challenge in itself when you are working with people with different equipment, skill levels and in different states.

I am willing to give it a shot but I don't think its feasible to ask people to volunteer to do this sort of thing on a fortnightly basis. Atm my current aim would be a 1 episode pilot filled with footage from the next NSW and QLD small meets then we see what the response is and go from there.

Steve
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Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

Marto: heres the thing, programs on TVS are made by the community FOR the community... All it takes is some good camera work and basic editing skills that most people in the forums already posses. Most people who make shows, make them from home cameras. The way you are talking I'd expect nothing less than a 3 hour movie, professionally edited with super computer special effects!

I think you might be thinking too far ahead too fast!

I award 8/10 for awesomness! 22 minutes is a fairly long time, but for each show, we could have a few minutes on construction, repair, design principles, etc that would more than make up for any shortfall of fight video. That sort of stuff is important to attracting new builders anyway - it shows them it's not really that difficult to get into the sport.

For impressive audio, we would stick a surface mic to the underside of the arena, it will mak the small bots sound more like tanks . Finding a good commentary voice might be a challenge; finding a good talking head will even harder - having a good presenter can make or break a show.

@ Marto: down here I would want to use only camera that record to SD cards or direct to disks. That way I can easily copy everything into my Premier Pro editing PC. It would still take quite a while to collect the footage, but its something that can be left going.

We would probably use the same production technique as a commercial serial show - have a shooting schedule and keep a large backlog of shows so that (say) an eirht month season is compressed into a much shorter run of weekly or fortnightly shows.

I know a guy into video production (he gets paid for it, its his day job)
he's interested in coming to at least one event to do some kind of 6 degrees of separation thing. He's also picked up some voice role in advertising.
And he has built his own electric car, (full sized)

I'll ask him if he's interested in lending a hand
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

Valen: thats all you need, really the audio would be best if its overdubbed... That way witty comments can be though of without the need to come up with something on the fly, noises can be amplified, the spinning up of shells and and spinners can sound like jet engines and crowd and children wow'ing can all be added... the station has legal rights to use music from certain companies so that can also be added to the backgrounds for free (if theres anything decent).

But think about it, by the time you introduce the bots and show what they are capable of, with a quick interview with the builder, you've probably killed about an hour already. so it could be quite easily stretched out to go over consecutive episodes while showing fights in between to keep the action going.. And im not talking about the kind of stretching you see in aircraft crash investigations where they repeat footage over and over to extend the show

A few smoke makers in bots will liven things up and give the commentator some action to comment on when things get slow etc etc etc...

Theres millions of ways to make something way interesting, not to , mention that you'll be able to legally advertise the club on there because its a not for profit organisation which should bring interested people to watch the next lot of fights and talk to the builders of their favorite robots... and to find out about joining and competing.

You can even gauge responses by asking people to email their favourite bots and picking the winner... the list goes on and on.

As for the naysayers, those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by those doing it.

right?

Quite right!

@ Jake; That guy you know sounds like a reall win, we should definitely invite him to an event & discuss a role. He might also be able to get some canned graphic elements done for us - In my TV production experience at a Channel 9 offshoot, the titling and graphics can take longer than everything else combined.

@ Byterapper: that royalty free music sounds awesome! its always been a stickingpoint in the past. The comedy sound effects get old pretty fast - the Battlebots show got a lot of bad press about it and years after the show finished, its still talked about. I wouldn't mind recruiting Carmen Electra as a presenter though...