Mr Bigstuff

Ryan Sampson – best known for Brassic and Plebs – authors and stars in brand-new, Sky Original comedy series, Mr Bigstuff. The series follows estranged brothers, Glen and Lee, who try to patch up a sibling rivalry that may well be beyond repair. Glen is a nervy perfectionist striving to live the suburban ideal, Lee is an alpha male with a prescription drug addiction and biscuit tin full of his Dad’s ashes. Glen and his fiancée share a perfectly mundane life together. Sure, Glen’s got crippling erectile dysfunction and Kirsty has a secret shoplifting habit, but they’re happy. That is until Lee comes crashing into their lives, on the run from a past that’s quickly catching up with him. The trio are forced together: a perfectionist, a fantasist and an anarchist all living under the same roof in an Essex cul-de-sac. It’s not long before their ‘perfect’ lives start to unravel faster than a cheap carpet. Danny Dyer makes his television comedy debut in this six-part comedy exploring broken families, fragile masculinity and carpet sales.

Vickie Mansell – Post Producer 

Sky Post were asked to oversee total media management for ingest, dailies prep and offline edit as well as supporting all elements of Post-Production from offline to picture lock and final post turnovers for this fantastic new comedy. The biggest success for me on this project was to ensure that we secured a robust workflow. To achieve this, I collaborated with our Workflow Supervisor, Naman Davda, to ensure that established and successful workflows were put in place for all facets of the media management landscape. During pre-production we were in constant contact with the onset film crew to establish and maintain an agreed workflow for rushes to guarantee a smooth transition for all daily turnovers between location, ingest and edit. Then we worked closely with the external Post Houses to oversee the final audio and vision post to the agreed workflow, meeting the individual facilities’ needs, whilst ensuring that they adhered to Sky’s precise delivery specifications. 

The creative inspiration for Mr Bigstuff was to shoot in a similar manner to Sergio Leone’s the ‘Good, Bad and the Ugly’ for which the Director and DOP wanted to shoot using anamorphic lenses to mimic the spaghetti western style. This resulted in a series of tech conversations to ensure the team had the approval from Sky to shoot anamorphically and at what level of crop was applied to meet and adhere to Sky’s Technical Standards. The anamorphic media brought fresh hurdles, and this was where we tested and proved our mettle in creating seamless media turnovers which guaranteed a successful hand-off for the incoming freelance Post Supervisor who was due to oversee the final external elements of Post.  

At Sky Post we always ensure that there is no single point of failure by continuously buddying up our Assistant Editors with a level of support that allows for overlapping cover at all times. Partnering deep experience with boundless enthusiasm has been key to the development of our teams and their skillsets and is something we successfully execute on all our longform projects. This was how we approached the Assistant Editor cover on Mr Bigstuff as it also coincided with our own internal Sky Post development programme giving our established pipeline of proven Edit Assistants the opportunity to undertake a secondment in Editing. As part of the overall process our Assistant Editor, Angela Perez Sarasa, the lead 1st Assistant Editor was tasked with editing quite a few scenes and becoming, in doing so, an indispensable part of the edit team.