Knightmare.com

Least he didint place the eye shield in the bathroom!

I had just read the 'Series' topic on knightmare.com and it takes a whopping £50,000 to preview an entire episode... TC must be a wealthy man indeed... or is that coming out of Angela's budget...?

Who's Angela?

Fidjit wrote: I had just read the 'Series' topic on knightmare.com and it takes a whopping £50,000 to preview an entire episode... TC must be a wealthy man indeed... or is that coming out of Angela's budget...?

I'm guessing that when a series is commissioned, a budget is assigned to it, which the makers of the show must work with. £50 000 per episode was the amount given, to pay for the studio, engineers, equipment, cast and crew. This is where the new series comes into its own - with no need for expensive Chromakey technology, the costs would be reduced by quite a lot. This would make the new series a more attractive prospect, because of the lower budget. I think I'm right in saying that Km was very expensive for a children's programme (in fact, probably for any programme). I reckon that it was this (as opposed to the excuse of 'changing demographic', which is feeble because Km continued to pull in viewers during its eighth series) that caused the plug to be pulled ten years ago.

Tim Child is unlikely to have fielded every penny of this project himself ~ They were awarded £40,000 from the Lottery in 2002 to work on the new show, if I recall correctly. Once commisioned you get the 'TV Money', and occasionally a few sponsors will come along and aid the show financially, although I never saw any evidence that KM received this.

Am sure their are other channels of finance.

£50,000 for 1 episode of any show involving such technology is actually not so expensive compared to some other shows. However for a Kids TV Show, it is a tall order. I doubt Spatz or Mike & Angello used this amount of money!

Spatz was a different type of show. Although it had some regular costs (e.g. extras), most of the set-building (i.e. the restaurant and the shopping centre) was done and paid for at the outset, and lasted for all three series. Also, Spatz was made by Thames TV and YTV (a Canadian company) in conjunction, which may well have split the cost.

There was also great attention to detail on Spatz. They even went as far as to produce actual sachets of Spatz sugar for the restaurant.

£50K sounds an awful lot...

Why would it cost that much? What's you're RPG like in the way of budget-wise Kieran... And you say you are using the props on permenant loan, does that mean you are keeping them?

Typical budget for an RPG is not excelllently high, we always rely on prop donations, or group members to bring in their own.

We paid for the blue screen in the last film shoot, and it cost around £45, with the paint included, which is actually pretty cheap overall.

Members bring in their own costumes, a few members own cameras, and a couple of us can act

Basically we rely heavily on group contribution, yet if you tallied up the cost of everything, including travel, acommodation, food, entertainment, props, costume, set....Then we're looking at around £3,000, very likely a bit more, as the collective cost for the group.

During our audition for series 4, the producer said they had a budget of £1m. That works out as more money per episode than the £480k for series 8, even given that there were more episodes.