With episodes ranging from charming Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? clones to twisted games of Simon Says, Dropout TV’s smash hit show Game Changer is “the game show where the game changes every show” - a premise that has only grown more ambitious as the seasons have gone on. Dropout CEO and Host Sam Reich occupies a role somewhere between Steve Harvey and the Riddler: keeping contestants in the dark until the last possible moment. But behind the cameras is DOP Kevin Stiller: he’s been here the whole time.
Having just wrapped the eighth season, we sat down with Stiller to chat about how the ever-changing games of Game Changer keep him on his toes.
The secrecy at the heart of Game Changer is just as important for the audience as for the players, and Stiller is reluctant to share too much about the then-upcoming season.
We wrapped the show about a week and a half ago. We doubled down on creating more complex, funny and bizarre games that haven't been seen anywhere else. It’s not unlike other past seasons where we still want to deliver very funny and engaging content - we aren't trying to reinvent the wheel - but rather we want to stay true to what the audience loves; and that is fun games that are truly wild and unpredictable.
That's probably about as deep as I can get without getting into the specifics - I might be shot and killed. [laughs] But you'll get answers soon. We're not going to hold on to it for very long…
The games aren’t the only thing changing with the new season. Having shot previous seasons on the Canon C300 Mk II, Game Changer’s multi-cam setup has been furnished with a fleet of Canon C400s.
[Season Eight] was the first season that we got to use the C400s on. We’d used and abused the C300 Mk II in prior seasons and they still work very well – almost ten years on.
Bright Tangerine gear has now supported us for many seasons and across different camera bodies. The team very obviously engineers with the end user in mind: nothing is generic. The Misfit Atom in particular serves us well when we need to shoot nimble, whereas the Baseplates give me peace of mind when building our rigs: knowing that lens height, rigidity, and functionality were all thoughtfully considered.
Regardless of the rig, how do you predict the unpredictable? Even when the format is set, unscripted content comes with its own laundry-list of headaches. But on Game Changer, one episode could be spread across a half-dozen hotel rooms, the next could turn a greenroom into an escape room. More than other Dropout productions – or productions in general - Game Changer is a huge team effort, and Stiller makes a conscious effort to keep everyone in the loop.
I’m sure everyone has their way to approach complexity like this. For me, the honest answer is overcommunicate, overcommunicate, overcommunicate. I try to go to each person individually and explain what I’m thinking of doing, even if it’s not related to their department.
You have to be as alert and communicative as possible with all your peers. And that also requires a receptive group all around to communicate like that. There are still things that fall through the cracks, for sure. But the only way I can think of doing the show effectively is when everyone's in the loop.
Like the contestants in One and Done, the Game Changer crew only have ONE SHOT. But if that puts extra stress on the crew, you wouldn’t know it: tune into any episode and you can easily hear crew members laughing – the sort of thing that normally gets you a glare from a 1st AD.
Whenever I am gearing up for the shoot and getting my crew together on the very first day, I'll band the entire crew together - all of my Operators and my ACs, my entire G&E department - and I'll say: “Just so you know, if you think something is funny, you should laugh at it - and you should laugh as much as you can.”
It creates a great stage for improv comedy. If we can laugh for the performers, it helps propel them to the stratosphere - so we openly encourage the crew to laugh. The only time where it becomes a problem is I have Operators laugh hard enough that I start to see the camera shaking. Only then – but I just tell them to lock off their camera and keep laughing.
It is far more important to me that you can just train your shot on a wide and laugh. A lot of my Operators have trained that instinct season-to-season. I mean, what a blessing that we can laugh at work!
Stiller credits a lot of the behind-the-scenes positivity to Sam Reich, who is slightly less sadistic than the puzzlemaster persona he has on-screen.
Sam - our writer, showrunner, host, et cetera - is such an amazing leader. He loves to give the crew their fifteen minutes of fame.
He did something this season that I will never forget called “Box, Box, Box”, where you get your group together before a show and gather in a big circle with an apple box in the middle. And then we all chant “Box, Box, Box” until whoever’s brave enough goes up onto the box and says whatever they feel grateful for.
That could be related to the show, or not at all - one time, someone said they were just really excited about a new TV show. We did this every single day, no matter how ambitious our shoot schedule was. It generated such gratitude on set unlike any other I’ve been on.
When you think of the film industry, you typically think of gruelling hours, long days, crew yelling at each other - and it’s always raining for some reason! But this was the complete opposite. Everyone was putting 110% into this sucker, and you’d see it. I feel so grateful to work alongside them.
If you want to work for Dropout, and you bring real gratitude to set, it makes all the difference.
Naturally, the Game Changer team repaid Sam’s attitude by kidnapping him.
The latest season finale, Samalamadingdong, turned the tables by creating a bespoke escape room for the CEO – with a full cast, and a full castle. Stiller and the crew had to keep the entire production completely secret for two months.
That episode gave me grey hairs! Normally I get a call from [our Producer] Justin Cyrul to start a new season, and he’s super positive: “we’d love to get you back, it’s going to be a great time” - that sort of thing. This time, he went: “You might want to sit down.” [laughs]
Because I was one of the first to hear about this, I had the duty of holding this secret. I was so nervous about spilling the beans, because we were actively talking every day about this shoot. I was terrified I was going to send the wrong message to the wrong Slack channel and totally blow it.
The closest we got was my lighting team and I were going over how we were going to light the foyer of the castle, and we kept saying “castle” with Sam standing a few feet away. Looking back at it, he would have absolutely no idea what we were talking about.
The initial staging was a fake interview with Vanity Fair, where Stiller had to use a crew-within-a-crew of members Reich wouldn’t recognise as already on his payroll – before being bundled into a car and driven to a particularly colourful Saw trap in an LA castle for a single day of shooting.
It was like planning the world’s largest wedding: we were going to have a hundred or so people on set. How do we set this puzzle up so we can get Sam’s reaction? How do we hide video village? How do we run power?
The castle also cost a lot of money to rent, so a lot of stuff we simply couldn’t plan. We couldn’t just go there to test things out like in our studio or an office. My phone at the time had a LiDAR scanner, so I scanned the whole castle and popped it into Blender. That really helped: a lot of filmmaking is just this weird blob in your brain until you can illustrate it in front of you.
We had beats that we wanted to hit, so we had to predict how long the puzzles would take Sam to solve and get the sense of day-to-night and schedule right. Game Changer is a weird hybrid of stage-work and documentary - I come from a world of shooting doc, and this episode was more on that end. But it was still a real labyrinth – pun intended, sort of.
But it truly went off exactly as we planned.
At the very end of that episode, there’s a big party where everyone comes out to celebrate, and I just felt this insane catharsis - I was bawling like a baby! The only way to pull off a stunt like this on your CEO is to have faith that the show is so spiritually meaningful, that the financial and social ramifications of us pulling one off on him is not out of the question.
I read comments across Reddit, TikTok - you name it - that the show must be scripted due to its complexity. But the entire show and this episode in particular is, honest to God, exactly how it presents: Sam was completely out of the loop.
The eighth season of Game Changer is available to stream now on Dropout.
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