Assemble This! Contestant Casting Call This Weekend!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UPDATE: Ithaca College professor’s campaign among top 2 percent, continues at record-setting pace

• Local initiative “Assemble THIS” among the top 2 percent of video projects on IndieGoGo

• Raises 170 percent percent of crowd-funding goal in 20 days

• Record-breaking campaign to pay students working on TV show created by Syracuse University and SUNY Cortland alum Peter Johanns

Ithaca, N.Y. April 21, 2015 — A campaign to raise funds to pay college students to work on a TV pilot game show has taken off on IndieGoGo, raising 170 percent of its goal in just 20 days. Assemble THIS is among the top 2 percent in the video/web category, or among three out of 131 active projects to have been more than fully funded. Students of Ithaca College will be paid to work on Assemble THIS, a half-hour television game show that will pit two couples against each other as they compete to assemble something a typical family would find frustrating.

Creator and Executive Producer of Assemble THIS, Peter Johanns, a professor and the director of the Television-Radio Program at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, said his own life inspired the show’s premise. “It was an idea with which I came up when my wife and I were bickering while putting together a "simple" toy bin for our son,” he said. “At the height of our frustration and marital tension, as we tried in vain to figure out the company-provided directions, I had an epiphany.”

Assemble THIS will be offered to national television networks such as TLC, Discovery and HGTV. However, as a TV professor, Johanns understood the high cost and number of people needed to make this idea into an actual game show. “We have a lot of great TV students here at the Park School and I thought they would really be onboard for an idea like this. I knew it was going to be a huge production, but I didn’t want to take advantage of them just because they are students. Therefore, I decided to pay each of them $10 an hour to work on this project,” he said. “However, because I didn’t have the money to pay them out of my own pocket, I started a crowd funding campaign to raise the money to pay them.”

Johanns is using 25 current students to produce three pilot episodes of Assemble THIS.

The show will be shot in High Definition using 11 cameras, including a drone, to capture all of the action. The students are doing every job on the production from finding the contestants, to operating the 10 cameras, to editing the shows together. Nearly 1,000 total student hours will be put into making Assemble THIS.

The campaign on IndieGoGo is currently among the site’s top trending projects and has reached success never before seen on IndieGoGo. Few initiatives have met such a big percentage of funding goals in such short span of time. The show will be produced May 9 and the crowd-funding campaign ends May 11.

The campaign can be found at: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/assemble

Johanns is a graduate of Schalmont High School in Rotterdam, N.Y. He received his master’s degree in Television Production from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications following his bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from SUNY Cortland. He has worked as a professional producer and director in the television industry for 25 years, winning several local, regional and national awards for his television productions and documentaries. He is also the owner of I.B. Productions, a television production company.

For interviews and questions, please contact: Noreyana Fernando — Public Relations Director of Assemble THIS — I.B. Productions

— C: 607-279-7973 — Noreyana.fernando@gmail.com — @NoreyanaF