“Every season of Game Changer, I get a little more nervous because I know we’re always trying to raise the bar,” says Game Changer editor Sam Geer. “It’s like, ‘How high can you raise the bar before it’s insurmountable?’ But we keep meeting our own goals, so hopefully whatever comes next will be a continuation of that.”
Hosted by Sam Reich, Dropout’s Game Changer is a game show where the premise changes every episode and the contestants must learn the rules as they play. Among the assortment of games, season 6 has seen contestants search for buzzers in a simple trivia game-turned-scavenger hunt for “Beat the Buzzer”, trapped in a time loop of an episode for “Deja Vu” and even brought into a parody of The Circle for the season finale, titled “Ratfish”. “The thing about Game Changer is, by its very nature, every episode has a different challenge,” says Geer.
Related Stories
Those challenges were lessened a bit this season, as Geer was able to be on set for the shoots. “I was actually on set as the director for that season as well, so I had a little bit better idea of what to expect when I started to edit.” This was especially helpful for episodes like “Deja Vu”, where the contestants were run through the same cycle of events multiple times and the edits needed to become faster and faster. “The editing part of it was a lot of fun for me, because it was an exercise in gradually speeding things up as the players get more familiar with what to expect.”
For “Beat the Buzzer”, being on set as director allowed Geer to work closely with the camera crew, who were following the contestants as they searched the studio for buzzers. “It was great to work with our DP Kevin Stiller and his team, as to how to adjust on the set, on the fly, to whatever chaos is going on,” he says. “Especially in an episode like ‘Beat the Buzzer’, where we had like 20 cameras. We had eight or nine operated cameras, and then we had a dozen remotely operated cameras, so it was a challenge, but it gave me a better sense of what to expect for the edit.”
Although his work editing scripted material for CollegeHumor was very different from editing unscripted content, Geer says it was a great education in being adaptable. “At the end of the day, the comedy is the most paramount thing, but in sketch there were times where we’re doing things that were super dramatic, or super melodramatic, or an action parody-type thing, so I got to explore a lot of different styles,” he says. “I think that education has helped me in Game Changer, where every episode is going to be slightly different, tonally.”
Click the video above to watch full interview.