February 12, 2020, by pmzmah
URNmaster – Meet the maker
Do you like Taskmaster? If so then you’ll love this! We’ve caught up with Matt Tyler (our very own Alex Horne) to find out about his latest project URNmaster and how his MMath is going.
What is URNmaster?
Taskmaster is a TV show on Dave which consists of 5 comedians completing very vague challenges, it’s the kind of show where you want to get involved and do it yourself at home. I started having my own ideas of challenges that I would like to see on the show, so I thought I would put them together and create my very own taskmaster. I then started to think of who I wanted to take on the roles of the comedians from URN (University Radio Nottingham). The five participants we had were: Grace (from the Grace and Matt show), Fred, Radhan, Reece and Emma. Our version is a five part series which you can find on the NSTV Facebook page.
How did you orchestrate all of the challenges?
This was really hard! Although there were four challenges shown on our series, we had actually filmed 10 different ones. The first task we told them was fake and we asked them to describe themselves using just five words, then a few weeks later we asked them to list those words again and they’d get a point for every correct word. This didn’t make the cut. On our first day of filming we recorded four different challenges, the only one that we decided to use was the logo one. I also felt more nervous on video than I thought I would. One thing that I noticed in the initial recordings was they everyone was focusing on trying to be funny and it didn’t come across as natural. The more challenges we did the more everyone settled into it and it began to flow more.
I even ended up carrying around a toaster for the bread challenge!
So what are URN and NSTV?
Voted Best Station at the National Student Radio Awards in 8 of the past 9 years, broadcasting 24 hours a day. There are a variety of shows including Speech, After Dark, and Daytime; where I co-host a show called the Grace and Matt Show (every Friday 9am-11am). Everyone who dedicated their time are really great people who are full of passion and really keen on it.
NSTV has loads of video content (including URNmaster) and I’m the head of entertainment this year.
How do you balance all of this extra-curricular work with your course?
I’d definitely describe myself as a proactive learner, so I find that the best way for me to learn is to revisit material and actively use it in a problem. For me this means that I can balance everything reasonably well between all this extra work and my MMath.
How are you finding your MMath at the moment?
It’s very good thanks, and I find the module topics really interesting too. I’m really excited about my dissertation project. It’s all about modelling the stability of groups of people when dancing at a free-flowing social dynamic situation (which in human words means modelling what kind of groups are stable and stay together in a nightclub). So take a large group of people; if the nightclub is empty they’ll form a circle, as soon as it start getting busier everyone gets a bit crushed and you’ll find they split into smaller groups of say three or four people. If you’re with three people you’ll pretty much stay together all night. I believe it’s to do with the space in between you, because people see it and think “I can push you a bit because I have the space”.
I’ve written a bit of code that takes the shape of the club, the number of people and spreads them out, gets them all thinking about who they want to be with, group them up, and now I need to do the next step. Now I need to think about when people get bored of who they’re with, start splitting off and joining new groups, is there now space? My biggest challenge is now finding the research to back this all up.
To watch the episodes click on this links below:
Don’t forget to tune into the Grace and Matt Show too, every Friday from 9am-11am on https://urn1350.net/.
No comments yet, fill out a comment to be the first
Leave a Reply