Nuts show shoots on mobile phones

Multiplatform producer Hub TV is shooting 30 x 2-minute mobisodes of The Belly Dancing Mobi-Diaries, which will follow a troupe of belly dancers over 10 weeks.

A three-person crew will film the Belly Dance All-Stars as they audition a new member, try new routines, source costumes and head out on the road.

The diaries will premiere on the Nuts TV mobile platform in early April and will later be stripped on weeknights across the channel for six weeks, with a compilation airing at weekends.

Nuts TV owner Turner Broadcasting Systems is also looking to partner with YouTube and other social networks and will run extra content on Nuts TV's website.

Nuts TV director of programming Joe Talbot said the format was an experimental way of offering a warts-and-all look at its subject.

“Traditional filming on Digibeta has played against the intimacy of the mobile platform and we want to have a more intimate feel than you can get when you're shoving a camera crew in people's faces,” he said.

“We're trying to follow the troupe in a way that's real. There won't be a lot of movement but there will be vox pops and you'll see the mobiles being passed around between the dancers and the crew.”
Hub TV is filming the series on Nokia phones equipped with five- megapixel video cameras. It will edit the content on Final Cut Pro and compress it using Episode.

Talbot acknowledged that filming on mobiles meant that picture quality would not match regular broadcast output, but said Nuts TV would be careful to put the content in context when it was broadcast. One option is to screen it using one-third of the TV screen.

“It will have a certain rough and ready look, but as long as the content is good, people will forgive you,” he said. “More and more people are filming on their mobiles and the level of quality has increased. You couldn't have made this even a year ago.”

Hub TV previously made Nuts TV's 4 x 60-minute series Fit and Fearless and is also behind ITV Mobile's sitcom The Gym.

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