Noise Some Makes – Game Changer S8 Review

I absolutely nailed my prediction from last week of what this episode was gonna be, both which specific episode and its game! Admittedly not all of my details were perfect, but I did get the general idea of it, but I think that's fine.

Like my other Game Changer reviews, this post will contain spoilers for the episode, so if you're interested in watching it yourself please do that first.

Noise Some Makes is an episode of Game Changer based on another Dropout show, Make Some Noise, which itself was based on an some episodes of Game Changer. We'll have to find a name for this type of thing if they do it again, though it seems Dropout themselves don't either according to the behind the scenes.

The episode features the Noise Boys [Josh Ruben, Zac Oyama, and Brennan Lee Mulligan], who are joined by Jess Ross, Lily Du, and Jordan Myrick respectively as guessers. The Noise Boys are giving prompts in secret that they have to act out, and then the guessers have to guess what they are!

After that first round they are then joined by artists Kiana Mai, Lisa Hanawalt, and Caldwell Tanner, who are given the secret prompts and have 1 minute to draw them, then the drawing is passed onto their respective Noise Boy who has to act it out, and then the respective guesser tries to guess it.

And after that we get the final iteration, where sneaky production assistant Kaylin Mahoney was brought into without warning and placed in a telephone booth. From here the artist would get a prompt and try to draw it, then the drawing is passed onto Kaylin who got 10 seconds to call a Noise Boy and describe it to them, and then the Noise Boy has to act it out, and then the guesser tries to guess it. (btw I did clock that Kaylin would have something to do with it, as I feel like she always appears in sneakier episodes [i.e. Bingo, Deja Vu, and You-lympics])

TL;DR: This episode is a massive game of Telestrations.

Later on they also do some switcheroos where the players change stations counterclockwise, eventually looping back to their original spots for the final round. Also in each round the team who got the most points would give a punishment to another team/player.

I explained it in full detail so it might've taken me a while, but in execution the game is quite simple, so the episode is mostly just a group of very funny people doing funny things, which is great! This is one of the episodes that really focuses on the cast, and I love these.

This is what I like to call a mega-sized episode due to how many people there were, it actually ties for the most contestants ever with ten, if you count Kaylin Mahoney (which I do). Since there's a lot of them (in both quantity and variety) this is definitely one of my favourite casts of any episode ever, and despite being a standard-length episode with ten people I feel like everybody in it had time to shine!

I'm really glad that Josh is starting to compete in more episodes now, I loved seeing Kiana and Caldwell again (I loved seeing them in Um, Actually too), Lisa Hanawalt is new to Dropout and she was fantastic as well, and — like Sam himself said — an overwhelmed Kaylin is very funny!

I was rooting for the blue team, composed of Zac, Lily, and Lisa, and they did it after pulling the best game moment of the whole episode! Even after Zac got the worst punishment in the episode of having to wear noise-cancelling headphones playing Smooth by Santana on loop (which gave us some very good videos btw), his team and Kaylin got the prompt spot-on, and it was amazing to see.

Lastly, and very fitting with the frame I picked above, this is definitely one of my favourite episodes ever when it comes to both editing and set design. I had noticed it already, but they talked about it in more detail in the behind the scenes and it made me appreciate it a lot more! I really recommend checking that out too.

For the editing, since there were so many people in different spots they did a lot of split screen to be able to capture multiple people's reactions at the same time, and I really like how they did it! They've used split screening in other episodes before, probably most notable in Escape the Greenroom, but they used it especially well in this episode in my opinion, and I really like how they made the frames correspond to the respective teams! I also liked the use of cross dissolves during the drawing sections mixed with everyone's banter throughout, that was also very well done.

I also really liked the changed into and interstitials, so much so that I made a whole compilation of them. They even showed an unused interstitial in the behind the scenes. I wonder when the controversy will come in though.

As for the set, I am a very big fan of when they fully decorate it, just like Night Shift previously this season, and this time they mixed it with the standard Make Some Noise set! The podiums are the same, Sam's desk is the same, the TV wasn't the same but that was the only exception. They even added decals all throughout it that mimic the look of the Make Some Noise set!

My favourite detail was definitely the telephones and the booth, and I gained even more love for them after watching the behind the scenes! They fit the theme perfectly with the whole game of Telephone mechanic, I really like how they filmed it with that wide GoPro, and it appears it took a lot of work to rig the telephones properly, and I really admire the dedication!

In the behind the scenes, and even the episode itself they refer to this as a "Cursed Make Some Noise", even with its corresponding Cursed Golden Ears (which look straight out of Dredge btw), but to me it was anything but. This was an incredible episode with so much talent on display, both on and off camera, and it was an extremely fun variant of the game that I wouldn't mind somehow being brought over to the real Make Some Noise! (Would that make it a Game Samer double? triple even?)

This sounded pretty good to me!