News

In this one-off (repeatable) larp you’re a television news team preparing for tonight’s six o’clock.

The game starts at noon on a Saturday and goes through til 7pm when the news finishes. Crews record stories during the day, then report on them at 6 in a “live-to-air” (recorded) broadcast.


[size=75]This could be you[/size]

There’d be ad-breaks and kitten-up-a-tree filler stories, car trips and a real-wrld setting (but with additional stories supported by the “TC” system). There’d also be a steady stream of news from the wires and some very special exclusive stories…!

Anyone got access to a chroma key video mixing desk? And who’s got a camera?

Will we be covering stories that somehow involve zombies, pirates, Godzilla, or a clever amalgam thereof?

I don’t think so, but it’s fair to say that there may be one or two unusual scoops…

That looks pretty cool.

I have computer software that can do chromakey mixing of multiple video files, but not on live feeds. Don’t know if this is any good?

Hrm, could be an option - but I think hardware that can do live feeds would be where it’s really at. This would be used for picture-in-picture presenting, doing the weather and shot transitions.

What if you blended this into the Ghostbusters larp you suggested earlier?

The journalists have been assigned to create a report about the opening of a new Ghostbusters franchise in Auckland and they go about interviewing the Ghostbusters, hauntees, haunters, city officials, random streetwalkers, etc. in an effort to get the story. That would create an additional roaming group which would help keep things moving.

Bit different to a newsroom larp, but still quite interesting and TV-journalistic.

This sounds exactly like those Capital E OnTV things we did at school, for thsoe of you young enough to have still been at school after they replaced the Capital Discovery Centre with Capital E
…oh wait, Auckland - duh. You guys never had Capital E OR the Discovery Centre…

Discovery Centre was better. To be honest, the second time around doing the newsroom thing was boring.

A few people got to play with newsroom type stuff in high schools in NZ. But I think the audience (players) of this are the people that will never be news presenters - they’ve grown up and had to choose some other, accessible career path… their hopes of being a tv journalist are a thing of the past. But now they can re-live those dreams!

Ryan, that’s an interesting idea about larp-mashup, and one that could work a treat. I think the news crew would still have to make a tv program, and the ghostbusters would still have to bust ghosts. Just that their paths would cross and larp magic would happen.