This was actually a pilot for a new spoof show for Saturday tight ITV.

This was one of five or six spoof the public setups. The idea here was that some poor sucker won himself the opportunity to push the button to demolish the building to the bottom right of the lighthouse. As they push the button they see the lighthouse go down much to the alarm of everyone around them.

On the day they were fooled into thinking they were actually looking through the window of a portacabin on location when in actual fact there was a large HD screen outside. Can’t believe they’d fall for it but out of 10 punters, six fell for it!

Production shot the lighthouse in daylight on HD tape. A 7ft replica lighthouse was then built in a greenscreen studio and blown up whilst being captured on a Phantom high speed camera at 1200 fps.

Gary swapped in the model lighthouse and re-lit the scene to be pitch black with spotlights.

Lighting technicians then matched Gary’s lighting for real so that as the punter approached the location on the night it looked identical to the HD video.

fun but not seen it on air yet!

• December 31st, 2007
• TV, special projects