A Producer's Life

I've mentioned The County Line several times in previous blogs because I've been very involved with it this semester from being on crew to filming sports, making packages, doing interviews and finally last week, I got to produce my first show! I will admit that I was nervous at first because I am a perfectionist and wanted to make sure that it would turn out to be a great show. But as the week rolled on, things seemed to mesh together well and things slowly began gaining speed. We had a meeting in the newsroom to discuss possible package ideas and assignments for the show. After some discussion and brain storming it seemed we had more than enough material to try to jam into the 30 minuet show. Fellow Capstone classmate, NickyPiszczor, helped co-produce the show and was a great help. I have seen people work on putting the show together before but I had never actually produced so she helped show me the ropes of what exactly need to be done. We talked several times throughout the week to keep track of what stories were coming in and what we still needed. We met the night before the show to produce a rough draft of the rundown and it was interesting to see the process of entering all the information like run times, tape codes, story slugs and back timing. I noticed that one of the biggest pains in producing is making sure that your show is timed PERFECTLY. You must make sure all the package times, commercial blocks and other aspects are timed out perfectly to meet the 30 minuet slot. The day of the show was a very exciting day to say the least, both the joy and pressure of producing started weighing down on me. I stayed in the newsroom most of the day just emailing graphics, checking in with reporters on their packages and making sure the run down was complete and accurate. FINALLY it was show time at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and even tho I was slightly nervous I was more excited to physically see how the show would come together. Nicky and I finally stepped back and watched as all the aspects of the show came together, there was nothing much more we could do and the pressures we felt were lifted as we saw how smooth it ran. There were of course a few minor hiccups, but overall we were very proud of the show and everything ran great. This experience definitely opened my eyes to the world of producing and I'm very excited to delve deeper into producing at my internship this summer and also next year at WCN.