Yep, everyone in jury does, which is why making jury is such a big deal. Last one out before jury was Kristen, who only got $3,000 in stipend for staying four weeks.
Enzo also won the 3D television in the pinball veto challenge, the one that Brit won and that put Kristen in a unitard. All prizes can be exchanged for cash, so he’ll probably trade that in for another 3-5 grand. (Jeff traded his Hawaii trip for cash last season, which I found funny after the ocean of questions of whether Jordan would get to go.)
Note that toward the end, Britney and Enzo were hanging out on the outside couches commiserating about not winning anything. (This was before the Hide and Seek challenge.) They both laughed about how the stipend wasn’t even a first class plane ticket. Britney: “You can buy 2 bags of diapers with your stipend, so that’s good.” heh.
I wonder what the balance sheet is like for BB, without “cooking the books.” Especially as compared to Survivor
Including everything, it looks like they are giving out at most about 750K in prizes. Compared to survivor where the prize fund is ~1.3 Million?
Survivor has about 15 hours of TV time, Big Brother has about 40 hours of TV time. The production cost of survivor have to outweigh. Flying in all the support staff to exotic locations.
Yes BB spends a lot on challenge development. Engineering the “Swinging in the jungle” could not be cheap, but I would guess that they recycle a lot of the props from season to season.
To me, the main surprises were how close the vote was, and that no one said anything about who needed the money the most. Maybe Matt’s big lie poisoned that particular well.
I thought it was quite interesting how both finalists were so evenly matched in the complete-the-quote thing, and that they both guessed such low numbers for the wall hits. I wasn’t there and yet I immediately said it had to be over 200. They were swinging for 2 and a third hours, fercryinoutloud. But their brains were so numbed by the end that they guessed 75 and 91.
Survivor challenges are far more elaborate and expensive than BB challenges. BB challenges are basically highschool play set-pieces, whereas Survivor challenges often involve elaborate original constructions.
The swinging challenge in particular was incredibly basic. Two padded walls and a scaffolding for the ropes and water main is all you need, plus whatever cheapo set dressing to cover the innards of the construction. Everything they build for every challenge gets covered by cheap fabric, so they are free to use modern building materials with cheesy covers.
By contrast, nothing in Survivor is covered. Every inch of a Survivor challenge is on camera and must look good, and everything is constructed with logs and ropes. That’s a huge amount of manual labor and engineering art design. It’s the difference between a magician doing camera tricks and a magician performing in front of an audience. There is no curtain to hide the construction behind on Survivor.
Plus, Survivor challenges have to take up many times the area of BB challenges for the simple reason that there are no walls. BB challenges would look positively miniscule out in the open; the BB backyard is really small. The veto challenge that Ragan won was like 6 people standing side by side in little booths and it practically filled the whole space.
Also, Survivor uses expensive hi-def cameras, where BB never will because they don’t fit in the crawlspaces. Not to mention the logistics of all that film, which is apparently much bulkier for hi-def. Then again, I would guess one season of BB shoots way more hours of footage than all 21 season of Survivor combined. So come to think of it, I think BB spends more for film.
The one thing that sets BB apart from every other reality show is the cameras. In every other reality show, contestants are surrounded by crowds of producers, cameramen, lighting guys; a whol platoon of people. Amazing Race is pretty tight, with only two people following each team around.
BB has no almost no human interaction. Houseguests never see cameramen, can only talk to producers in the diary room but never see them, and only occasionally catch glimpses of boom operators on the roof during challenges. It’s wholly unique in that respect, and must be very unsettling, especially for people like Matt who have done other reality shows. (He was on Average Joes.)
I was surprised that Lane got three votes. He did not answer the questions well. Haydon was cocky and arrogant, so maybe that cost him a vote or two.
Brenchel both voted for Lane. That surprising since Lane appeared to be a “floater”, and winning only one HOH, (and one that Haydon could not compete in) He had to beat Enzo, Ragan, Britney in the Big Brother Blackkjack game. Not a mental challenge, and really not all that physical.
Right. Pretty much anything shot on video nowadays is recorded on huge hard drives or arrays of hard drives. And those are dead cheap and pretty portable.
Lane counts the face morph challenge as his second win. Hayden counted all 3 parts of the final HoH as a single challenge, which was smart. 5-1 sounds much better than 6-2.
The great irony is that Brendon and Rachel were the only ones to vote personally, while also being the only ones all season to say that they wouldn’t vote personally and hate people who do. They are douchey hypocrites to the bitter end.
It came out in interviews that Britney, Matt and Ragan spilled the beans about “Just The Tip” (love that name) to Brenchel in the jury house. For those who only watch broadcast, Britney, Matt, Ragan and Hayden used to do a nightly talk show directly to the cameras, most of which was spent mocking Brendon and Rachel. The original premise was tips for future houseguests on how to play Big Brother – Just The Tip – and those tips consisted of not behaving like Brendon and Rachel.
One example: “Don’t tell stories about how you woke up after a night of “partying” soaked in tequila with your skirt over your head and a wad of $100 bills laying on top of you.” Britney referenced this story to Julie when she voted Rachel out, which must have left much of the audience scratching their heads. Not hearing this story also makes the “hooker” insults seem more petty / catty than they actually are. They really do think Rachel is an honest-to-goodness prostitute based on the stories she told.
Anyway, they apparently told Brenchel about Hayden’s participation in Just The Tip, so they got all butthurt and voted for Anyone But Hayden.
Heh, my bad, I meant tape.
They probably shoot 700-1000 hours of footage every day, for 70 days. No matter how cheap and portable the storage devices, 50,000+ hours of high-def footage would be a massive undertaking.
I thought it was a pretty great season. The contestants seemed to enjoy each other. Plus, much love to the Zing bot. It would be ama- Ziinnnnggg! to have the bot return in future seasons.