YJL

1   First: the Math is wrong

When the first floor plan showed up on screen, I couldn’t help but shake my head.

Because I can’t find a clip from Animal Planet’s website¹, you have to bare with my ASCII drawing, the screen showing a sort of animation for scale about the square feet of the featured house. It looks like:

+----------------------------------+
|                                  |
|           /--------------\       |
|                     |    |       |
|        1,234 sq. ft |---  \---\  |
| |---bar----|                  |  |
|                     |   |     |  |
|    +--------------------------/  |
|                                  |
+----------------------------------+

The bar under the 1,234 is expanding from the left edge of screen to right. It’s an animation to bring out the sense of the size of the house.

But it’s clearly wrong and shows whoever makes the animation doesn’t know about area. The animation isn’t even actually represent a scale sense or length. It’s basically meaningless. You only need that “1,234” and the floor plan.

Since I am decades away from the time I was taught about area, so I searched and found it’s taught at 3rd or 4th grade. Animal Planet is meant for educational channel, ain’t it? How could you even make an animation like that?

Don’t they hire professional consultant like real architect for some professional inputs and reviews? Heck, you just ask your kids who would spot the error right away.

Note that, the bar seems to be magically gone in last two houses of second episode, maybe someone do notice the error? But how hard is it to re-make those animations?

2   A decade late and too short

If you have read my blog, you know I am a fan of Grand Designs of Kevin McCloud on Channel 4. It’s a much better show than Living on the Edge. The content of first two episodes probably mostly have been seen in first few seasons of Grand Designs, and that’s long time ago.

Straw bale, underfloor heating, earth sheltered, I’ve already got born in Grand Designs because it’s nothing new and they have been covered plenty of times. The first episode of Grand Designs was aired in 1999. To be fair, straw or earth, that’s nothing new, people had been building those houses for centuries and us—the modern human—get wow’d by those. Kind of funny, don’t you think?

30-minute show for three houses is really too short, you just get a glimpse of a thing then it’s gone. It’s meant to be educational right? Not a showy show, correct?

The producer has to change their way to represent those houses, or just a television show to fill a time slot and make some money from commercial. Yup, 10 minutes for a house including commercial time.

The show don’t do the houses justice. In my opinion, two houses is barely squeezing by in 30-minute runtime.

3   The very first one

To make my point, I suggest you go to watch “New Lives in the Wild: Texas” (2013) of Ben Fogle on Channel 5. It features with entire episode on John Wells’ “The Field Lab” in Terlingua, Brewster County, Texas.

When you compare 10-minute to full episode production, that gives you more depth and more realistic of how does it feel in that desert. The shower stall, the solar oven, the green house, you don’t even get close to the reality in just 10 minutes.

Why do television channels keep producing reality show which have not much of reality element in it and call it “reality show?”

4   Confusion

I’ve not watched any Animal Planet’s programs for a long time, but when I checked out its website for a page for this show while I’m already confused about how on Earth a show about houses being broadcast on a channel about animals, I saw more shows doesn’t seem to fit into the channel.

I’m really confused.