So this week was quite the surprise on the set of The County Line! For those of you who need to be filled in, TCL is a weekly news program we run from our college campus which is reached by homes all over Lawrence and Mercer counties. The staff, producers, and anchors for the show are made up completely by Westminster students. This is a great opportunity for us as young professionals because we can learn the ropes of a TV station, and learn from our mistakes as well. AND BOY did we have a lot of mistakes this week!
The night started out as it normally would, we had a meeting before the show and began to run thru the show before we actually aired live. The run thru was a little shaky, but nothing more than to be expected for the first try. When we started the show at 7:30, all hell broke loose. On our rundown sheets, many of the cameras/video lines were mixed up and did not correlate with the packages we were running. After the first couple package tosses, we had some major “technical difficulties” and ended up sending it back to the anchor who informed the audience of our problems and we went straight to commercial to get ourselves back on track. That wasn’t even the end of it though, we had a little trouble with some of the audio/video in the packages themselves and we ended up finishing the show two whole minuets early. This left a lot of dead air time with no functioning overhead camera so we just pulled back one of our studio cameras and left it on the anchors until 8:00 finally rolled around.
Unfortunately, we got a lot of bad wrap, but in the end it was no one individual’s fault, we all had made mistakes at some point which just accumulated. While talking to my friends around campus, a lot of them asked me what happened on the show this week. I explained our unfortunate events, and ended up just laughing it off with them. I do not see this as a negative experience however; it was mainly a learning experience. First of all, I had no idea so many people actually watched the show on campus so that gave me hope that we had a good audience. Secondly, we learned that organization and professionalism are a MUST while producing a television news program. You can run a show 50 times and be completely comfortable with it, but when it comes time to go live, you never know what surprises could pop up, you must be quick on your feet and have a tough skin!
The night started out as it normally would, we had a meeting before the show and began to run thru the show before we actually aired live. The run thru was a little shaky, but nothing more than to be expected for the first try. When we started the show at 7:30, all hell broke loose. On our rundown sheets, many of the cameras/video lines were mixed up and did not correlate with the packages we were running. After the first couple package tosses, we had some major “technical difficulties” and ended up sending it back to the anchor who informed the audience of our problems and we went straight to commercial to get ourselves back on track. That wasn’t even the end of it though, we had a little trouble with some of the audio/video in the packages themselves and we ended up finishing the show two whole minuets early. This left a lot of dead air time with no functioning overhead camera so we just pulled back one of our studio cameras and left it on the anchors until 8:00 finally rolled around.
Unfortunately, we got a lot of bad wrap, but in the end it was no one individual’s fault, we all had made mistakes at some point which just accumulated. While talking to my friends around campus, a lot of them asked me what happened on the show this week. I explained our unfortunate events, and ended up just laughing it off with them. I do not see this as a negative experience however; it was mainly a learning experience. First of all, I had no idea so many people actually watched the show on campus so that gave me hope that we had a good audience. Secondly, we learned that organization and professionalism are a MUST while producing a television news program. You can run a show 50 times and be completely comfortable with it, but when it comes time to go live, you never know what surprises could pop up, you must be quick on your feet and have a tough skin!
1 comment:
We need to do a run through and RUN all the tapes. With Coaches' Corner now out of the way we have that machine available for playback during the run through.
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