Here's What's Up

I recently got a smart phone. And, yes, I've already made the jokes myself about how my telephone has more intelligence than I do so you can save yourself the effort.

Said phone is currently my only access to the Internet unless I venture either to the nearby public library or farther north to my parents' house. Yes, there are also numerous cafes with WiFi but if I wanted to pay $5 every day to log on, I'd just go ahead and get Verizon FiOS. And I need to spend less time online, not more.

I mention this to explain my lack of regular updates here on the blog. Well, that and not having a lot to report. Especially now that I've shared the smart phone news.

Yes, I could thumb-type little missives on my phone but I don't get a sense that anyone is holding his breath waiting for my next entry. If I did, I'd send that person an e-mail directly advising better use of his lung capacity.

I will brag about completing my annual mission to avoid junk food and to work out every day in January. This marks five years in a row I've accomplished this. Granted, some (OK more than some) of the workouts lasted less than ten minutes but at some point I pulled out the weights and did some work with them. Every day. All month.

With hit-or-miss freelance work now tilting more to the miss side, I added two more aspects to the New Year's challenge. I also played at least some guitar and piano each day of the month. Again, we're not talking hours of practice, here. Even I can stand to listen to myself play for only so long before nausea sets in.

This would explain why my high school friend Jamie doesn't e-mail me any more. Through alignments of planets and stars that would baffle Stephen Hawking, she may be the only person who has subjected herself to hearing me perform music in person twice. She is probably doing all she can to ensure that she has heard the last of me. Literally.

That doesn't count Mrs. Schneider, the teacher of the four piano lessons I had when I was 17. She was paid the princely sum of $4 per lesson and, by golly, she earned all of it. It also doesn't count my brother Jim, who listens to anything I post here but that's recorded and — through a generous amount of computer enhancement — sounds almost like music.

I did have a story I wrote about the Venice Gondoliers Barbershop Chorus air on WEDU last week. The station doesn't have video online that I can embed here but you can click here to watch the episode. My story comes about 14 minutes in.

Don't worry, that's not a request. I just put the link there to prove I wasn't making that up. You can watch the show's end credits if you don't believe me. Or you can just continue not believing me. That might be easier.

Last Friday, I did interviews for another WEDU story. Riverview High School in Sarasota (not to be confused with Riverview High School in Riverview) has a marine biology program. It even got a license from the state to operate a fish farm right in the classroom. Grants funded construction of the tanks, adapted from concrete burial crypts!

That reminds me. I should be transcribing the interviews instead of writing on a blog.

On Air Again

If you found my humble home on the blogosphere from a Google search for Meredyth Censullo, I am happy to tell you that she has hooked on with another station in Tampa Bay. She begins reporting traffic for WFTS (Ch. 28) Monday.

The reason Meredyth has merited mention here is that I was her fill-in when she worked at WTSP and replaced her on an interim basis when she left in August.

I sent her a note congratulating her on the new job. It included my observation that often what has seems like bad luck is really just good luck that doesn't make sense yet. I've noticed it a few times in my life. Now she has first-hand experience with the idea, too.

Ch. 10's search for Meredyth's replacement is going nowhere fast. I'm told that the station has looked at tapes but hasn't seen anyone it likes enough to bring in for an interview. The out-of-work radio DJ that auditioned took another job.

I'll try to enjoy the gig while it lasts and continue trying to develop freelance business.

On that subject, I may get to do a story about author Stuart Kaminsky for WEDU. Kaminsky lives in Sarasota and his Lew Fonesca series of books is set in the city.

I also have several stories in the works for ZooToo TV, which I'll detail when they become more definite.

Millionaires Story Airs

It doesn't take a lot of money to become a Sarasota Millionaire. But it requires a passion for football that lasts long after most people have played their last game. See the world of difference between semi-pro and pro football. Meet the players whose love of playing won't let them let go of the game. And hear the story of the couple who want to make the Sarasota Millionaires an invaluable part of the Gulf Coast.

That was the blurb I wrote summarizing my most recent -- I was going to say "last" but I hope it isn't -- story for WEDU-TV's A Gulf Coast Journal. You can watch in the window below. It comes about 12-and-a-half minutes in.

Meandering Storm

Just when we thought we had dodged Tropical Storm Fay, the forecast track from NOAA offers the possibility that the storm will loop back into the Gulf of Mexico and try again.

At least my professional career is humming along. Oh, wait.

I did get an e-mail from my former boss with a tip about a job opening in Tampa for a web artist. That was kind of him except that I don't think I'm qualified for the job. I know some Photoshop and Flash but I wouldn't call my skills at either professional grade.

And I'm torn. Do I get another job in a cubicle or do I stick it out and try to build a freelance business? It's been slow going so far on that front. The WEDU work has slowed down and the senior producer says she's reluctant to hand out too many assignments until she knows that the show (A Gulf Coast Journal) will be renewed for next year.

I do have one story about novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky upcoming but we don't shoot that until at least late next month and it won't air until December.

I haven't heard anything about the coming season of the high school sports show to which I've contributed in past years. The company that produces it has been difficult to work with and I had filed it into the "life is too short" category. It may behoove me to swallow my pride and weather whatever aggravation comes with the work.

The woman for whom I fill in as WTSP's morning traffic reporter is leaving in October. Her departure was not her idea. She does a good job but had the misfortune of doing it on a morning show that nobody watches. Management must feel pressure to do something so out go the weather and traffic anchors. One of the news anchors was demoted and later left a few months ago.

She's got some time off to burn before then so maybe I'll get some more work there. I am not a candidate to replace her. They're looking for someone younger and blonder rather than older and balder, I'm sure. But maybe the new person will take more vacation time and I'll pick up some more days there.

I still haven't gotten to shoot any more of the personal documentary demo about a friend's parents. I may have to break down and launch the service as it is now, once I add pages to the personal-documentary.com web site detailing some packages with prices that I'll offer.

Many video biography sites that I've researched don't list prices on their sites but I don't want inquiries from people who expect me to produce a professionally polished hour-long documentary for $500. These will cost thousands.

And they will be worth every penny.

Meantime, we're on storm watch here. I've got my water, canned food, and nutrition bars -- as well as some not-so-nutritious ones -- to eat. I have plenty of books and an acoustic guitar to entertain myself.

I Have to Fall in Love First

Then the rest of the story comes.

I just sent off a completed script on my next story for A Gulf Coast Journal, a program on Tampa's PBS affiliate. This one is about the semi-pro football team called the Sarasota Millionaires.

(Previously written about Here and again later here.)

What a relief to get that load off my shoulders.

The load lightened considerably once I got the opening sequence figured out. That's when the affair starts. I don't need to like the topic or the subjects to love the story. I just have to figure out how it's going to start and where it's going to go from there. Then I'm hooked. After that the story sometimes comes in bits and pieces that I have to fit together and sometimes rearrange later but it always comes.

Often I have to do my best writing to cover holes in my interviewing. The story will lead me to a logical point where I can't go because I failed to ask someone about it. It's sometimes a good idea to try to write a story before doing the interviews. If the final script is provides answers, trying to write it will show me the questions.

The danger with this "writing on spec," when I'm able to do it, is becoming too enamored with what I've written. Sometimes the facts get in the way of my well-turned phrases and I have to force myself to dump them.

That wasn't a problem with the previous story about dulcimer players. I didn't know enough about the subject to even guess at how the story would go. That one aired last month and the station has put it online. It's the second story, about 8-and-a-half minutes into the show.

Adaptive Golf

The most recent story I produced for WEDU is now online. This was the one about the program that helps disabled people play golf. It comes at about 8:15 into the broadcast. However, the first story features puppies so you might not want to rush through it.

You might not want to rush through it, anyway. Even knowing what was coming after being able to supervise the editing for the first time, the final result dismayed me when it aired. I don't know why. Maybe I'm not as good at writing stories as I thought I was. Maybe I'm still adjusting to the format and to writing for someone else's voice. Whatever it is, I need to identify it and fix it.

Freed to Freelance

I've been working for a real estate developer at a time when that business has basically fallen off a cliff, especially here in Florida. Our company has had numerous rounds of layoffs and has continued to hemorrhage cash. After a recent round of layoffs, I was in a company-paid computer class at a local community college. Among the students were two people who had just lost their jobs. (The company had already paid for the class so it let them attend anyway.) When one of them mentioned the severance package he got, I thought, 'I'd take that deal!'

In the epitome of "be careful what you wish for," I got that severance deal last week.

I’m a little nervous but I’ve been too occupied with freelance work to digest the news fully. I haven’t even read the paperwork that the HR guy went over with me when it happened Thursday morning. That afternoon I spent contacting people I’ve done freelance work for to let them know of my increased availability. Friday I transcribed tapes for a story I’m producing for a show that airs on the local PBS affiliate. Saturday I had to go into the station to supervise editing of another story for the same show. After that I wasted an hour shooting crappy photos at a local botanical garden then went to visit my parents. They asked what I had done that day.

"I had to edit a story for WEDU. Can you believe that? Unemployed and I still have to work. What’s up with that?"

Speaking of WEDU, the station has posted the April edition of A Gulf Coast Journal on the web. This includes the story I produced about Venice's song-and-dance man Eric Watters. It's the second story in the show roughly 8-9 minutes in. That's early for one of my pieces. So accustomed was I for stories I produce to appear near the end of the show that when this one first aired I missed it because I had tuned in too late!

The episodes debut the last Thursday of the month then re-air the following Sunday afternoon. I caught the Sunday re-run. Through the magic of the Internets, you can watch it below.



It was last December that I got an e-mail asking if I could cover this story. Eric was about to go through his now annual rite of playing Scrooge in the Venice Little Theatre's production of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The story, to air in the spring, wasn't to be about that performance, I was told, but it was important for us to shoot it and -- I presumed -- include it in the story.

I apparently presumed wrong. Not one frame of video from the play appeared in the final cut of the story. Unfortunately, a stray soundbite from the play's director did survive and I'm afraid it confuses more than it illuminates. Out of nowhere someone pops up unannounced and un-introduced, says something very flattering about Eric, then disappears with no explanation of what qualifies him to comment.

Stories will almost always face cuts for time reasons. A segment producer's job is to fall in love with the story until he or she thinks a viewer cannot possibly see too much of it. The overall show producer's job is to judge the reality of how much a viewer wants to see. Here is an instance in which I wish they had cut about 8-10 seconds more.

The story I produced for the May episode should air in a form I recognize. I got to supervise the editing of a story about an adaptive golf program now nationally headquartered in Sarasota. Prior stories had edited during the week when I was occupied by full-time employment. This time the regular editor was on vacation and Drew Duncan, the freelancer filling in, was willing to work on a weekend.

The good thing about watching the editing process as that I can see when something that looked good in the script doesn't come across as well on the screen. I can have the editor chop down a soundbite or cut it out altogether to improve the pace of the story. When we finished, I also made sure to leave a second version that came in under four minutes. If a cut-down version was to air, I wanted to be the one wielding the hatchet.

You will not be any more surprised than I was to learn that the senior producer chose the shorter version of the story. That's the one I would have gone with too.

Sorry Again Mr. Squirrel

For distracting you from the other squirrel who wanted to steal your nut.


Which he did for a moment before you snatched it back and scurried up a branch, leaving your rival sitting nutless in a tree at the USF Botanical Garden in Tampa.

A friend wrote asking why there had been no blog entries for a week. I wrote back: "Be glad your life is more interesting than mine."

Case in point:


That's where I spent Friday night and half of Saturday. And I know what you're thinking.

Madman! What a party animal!

It's an edit suite at WEDU, Tampa's PBS affiliate. The station's regular editor was on vacation. His freelance substitute was willing to work at night and on Saturday so instead of drunken karaoke -- with me doing the karaoke and everyone else, if they're smart, doing the drinking -- we were editing a feature story about the Adaptive Golf Foundation of America.

Someone get that guy's car keys before he goes out and kills somebody!

But nobody thought to get my keys so about 10 p.m. Saturday night I got into my car and went looking for places to take more night shots of downtown Tampa. I found some.


The next day back at WEDU, peeking at the photos on my laptop, I noticed that many of the shots were blurry. Noticed in passing, of course, as my attention focused laser-like on what the editor was doing. "What? Oh, yeah, sure. That shot looks great there. Can I see it again?"*

How did that happen? Not the video edit. How could I have shot so many photographs out of focus?

I told you he was drunk.

We finished editing the story around 2 p.m. -- too late to go to the local horse-racing track to see if my father was hanging out there and too early to drive out to Clearwater Beach and wait for the sunset. Instead I went to the USF Botanical Garden to see if any butterflies would pose for pictures.


Whaddya know? They did. And, whaddya know? Most of these came out blurry too! I am obviously retarded. (My apologies to anyone offended by my use of the term -- especially retarded people unfairly maligned by the comparison. I can hear them now. "I am waaay smarter than that moron!")

When I described the problem to my brother Jim, he explained that the problem was my ISO. I don't know ISO from an ice cream cone but in this context, he must have been talking about a camera setting. He cited a tip from a book that I own -- and have read -- suggesting a different setting that would keep more of the frame in focus.

OK, he's not a drunk. He really is retarded.

The next morning I went out to try again. Every day on the way to work I cross a bridge that spans the Alafia River and I've noticed the reflections of the riverside piers on the calm water. Morning is a gentler time of day and this shows it.


While shooting out here, I noticed that when I zoomed out to the lens' widest angle, everything went out of focus. Nothing I tried would fix it. It appeared that Friday night's blurry photos had less to do with my absent-mindedness than with a problem with the camera lens. I guess that's good because, unlike my retardation, there is a cure for the lens problem. And since the lens is only a few months old, it should still be under warranty.

Later in the morning I went to "The Kitchen" where few butterflies made even a flyby. I shot a few honeybees going about their daily chores before going to the gym to do one of mine.


I was tired enough when I got home to see if the cat was up for a sleeping contest. But with yesterday's blurry photos from the USF Botanical Garden still sticking in my craw, I drove up there to try again.


Of course this time the sun was harsher and the butterflies were fewer. But more of the shots I took came back focused so that was a plus.

What's the bottom line here? I'm not a drunk. I may be retarded. And one of my camera lenses needs repair. Aren't you glad you read all that?

John


*The editor himself described watching someone edit as ranking somewhere on the excitement scale between watching grass grow and watching paint dry. Only with those other two the viewer doesn't have to hear the same snippet of audio repeating numerous times. The editor had a script so I left him alone unless something something demanded my attention.

The Millionaires - Pt. Deux

We shot more of our WEDU story on the ironically named Sarasota Millionaires semi-pro football team Wednesday. I mentioned that at the team's last game the venue had no locker rooms and the players had to dress for the game in the parking lot. That was not a unique experience. They've had practice at it -- dressing for practice.


See? I'm not making this up. We interviewed four players, including running back Calvin Williams, who also co-owns the team and who -- all 5'7" of him -- at age 31 still believes he has a future in the NFL. Then again, if he doesn't believe it, who will?

The other three players had a more realistic outlook. This is not a career move for them. It's a way to keep what may have been the highlights of their lives alive a little longer. By day, Michael Peterson does tree trimming and lawn care. On this team he is still the star quarterback whose dazzling scrambles lead his team to victories.

The players have to have their own insurance and since this isn't a paying job, there's no workman's comp if they suffer an injury. All the players said they understood that risking their limbs meant risking their livelihoods. They know the stakes are higher but wanting to play outweighs the danger.

Ronnie Fincher pointed out that people could get hurt in car crashes or other accidents. He would know. In his job, the 38-year-old married father works as a Sarasota firefighter.

We plan to follow Ronnie and perhaps Michael (called "Mike Pete" by everyone on the team) through part of a regular workday. This will draw the stark contrast between their ordinary lives and their unusual "hobby," as one player called it.

The Millionaires

Saturday we began shooting another story for WEDU's A Gulf Coast Journal. I first typed "we shot another story..." but most of these stories are not one-shoot deals.

This one's about a semi-pro football team called the Sarasota Millionaires. They were playing in St. Petersburg against the St. Pete Sharks. The public athletic complex that hosted the game was only about 30 miles from Raymond James Stadium where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' home games happen but the gulf between semi-pro football and the NFL is immeasurable.

It was immediately obvious, however, long before kickoff. The complex has no locker rooms so players on both teams dressed at their cars in the parking lot.

The Millionaires' nickname is ironic since no one will get rich playing on the team. In fact, the players have to pay a fee to the team!

A husband-and-wife co-own the franchise. Bethsaida Williams runs the team; Calvin Williams is a running back on the team. He's 31, which makes him older than most of his teammates but far from the oldest. Calvin told me one guy is 39 and another is 42.

I teased Calvin about the "C" on his jersey. "Is that for 'co-owner?'"

"No," he said. "It's for 'captain.'"

"That must be one of the perks of ownership," I said. "They have to make you a captain." I was kidding but Calvin was serious in his denial and insisted that he had to earn his playing time.

The team's starting safety, Mo Harris, graduated from Sarasota Riverview High School in 1999. That means I probably saw him play when I reported sports for WFLA in the late 90s. Mo later played college ball at Eastern Michigan but, unlike some of his younger teammates, he's not hanging on to an ever-diminishing dream of playing for pay.

When I asked him why he was out here, he said simply, "I've always played football" while shaking his head as if he didn't quite know himself. But I understood. With any luck so will people who watch the story when it airs. We'll do on camera interviews Wednesday before the team's practice. While the photographer shot the game, I tried shooting still shots. Luckily, the story's success did not hinge on my ability to capture action with my camera.

(The slide show below works in Firefox. It may not show up in Internet Explorer.)

Project Cure

As promised, here is the most recent edition of WEDU's monthly magazine A Gulf Coast Journal.

The story I produced is the one about the retired husband and wife neurosurgeon and nurse who volunteer for an organization called Project Cure. It comes about 14:50 into the show. (The first story in the show runs more than 12-and-a-half minutes.) To skip forward to there, press the play button. The running time will display. Then you can move the slider up to any spot in the show and play it from that point.



Yes, I realize that the opening montage of shots of African hospital patients set to music that dissolve with no explanation to the person at the storage space may not make sense. The opening narration was one of the parts that did not survive the story's editing.

I had written: "A child lying sick in an African Hospital does not have access to the wonders of modern medicine that we do. But in some poor countries that is changing. And the road to better health care in places like this begins very close to home."

Then we were supposed to go to the shot of the story's subject, Judy Kraut, at the storage space in Sarasota County, the "very close to home" where the road to better health care in developing countries begins. I might have opted to shorten some of the soundbites later in the story to preserve the voice-over introduction but those decisions aren't mine. It's their playground and I'm grateful they include me in the games.

Being Edited

My second story for WEDU's program A Gulf Coast Journal aired tonight. Because my full-time job (for now) means I can't be there when stories are edited, what shows up on TV comes nearly as much of a surprise to me as it does to anyone else watching.

This is new to me. When I reported news, once the producer approved the script, I had a good idea what the story would sound like, at least, because the editor rarely deviated from the script. When I do sports stores for The Dodge Sports Report, a high school show that airs on a statewide cable network here in Florida, I have complete control because I do everything on them myself: I shoot them; I write them; I narrate them and I edit them. There are no surprises.

Here, even after going back and forth through several drafts with the show's senior producer, the script serves only as a rough outline for the editor. The narrative that I painstakingly put together gets taken apart and reassembled after some of the pieces have fallen to the floor.

I'm not complaining. These aren't my stories. I do the legwork and I write what turns into the basic structure for them but I'm just one of the many hands involved in their creation. Someone else shoots them, the senior producer makes changes (euphemistically called "suggestions"), the show's host Jack Perkins narrates them and a different person edits them. If having a more distant influence over stories than I'm accustomed, I try to remember whose stories these are. As I told the senior producer, "the station is paying me. When I pay the station, I can tell it what the stories will look like."

I added that I own a video camera and that if it's that important that I dictate how stories look, I can shoot them myself for my own amusement. Which I have. They served another purpose when I needed material to demonstrate my skills to WEDU.

If not thrilled with how the pieces turn out, I am mollified by the turnaround time for payment once I submit my invoice, which is lightning fast. If the station is happy with the results, so am I. We've shot two more stories and two more are in the planning stages.

When the station posts the current episode online, I'll put it up here. Meantime, here is the episode from last September that includes the first story I produced for the show. It's the one about the radio controlled car racers and it comes about 17:45 into the show. To skip forward to there, press the play button. The running time will display. Then you can move the slider up to any spot in the show and play it from that point.

Project Cure Shoot

We shot another story for WEDU yesterday. As part of a project for her church, a woman who lives in Venice, FL named Judy Kraut thought she might be able to dig up an old stethescope. She started asking around for other medical supplies "and the whole thing just snowballed." Now hospitals around the world who use equipment donated from around the world can trace some of their supplies back to Venice, Florida.

Judy and her husband Bill collect supplies by the van load, rent storage space for it until it can fill half a tractor-trailer load and truck it off to an organization called Project Cure, which then sends the stuff to needy hospitals in places across the globe.


Judy was particularly excited to note that the hospital beds she was helping load were hand-crank beds. "Many places," she said of the beds' potential destinations, "don't have electricity."

It wasn't a complicated shoot since all that was going on was people loading boxes onto a truck. Lucky for me, Bob Hansen, the photographer I mention in the previous post, would know how to make the most of the situation. I mentioned looking forward to working with him again. Though we had kept in touch since I left WFLA in 1999, it had been more than eight years since we had been on a shoot together. I worried that maybe I had idealized our work together and we wouldn't mesh as well now as I remembered we once had.

Not a problem. My job would consist mostly of helping to carry stuff and staying out of the way. The hard part comes for me now that the story is shot. I'll get copies of the tapes, including one provided by Project Cure showing some of the overseas hospitals it serves, and go through them to see what we have. The thing about television is that it doesn't matter what the story looked like when you saw it yourself. You can only tell the parts of it that you have recorded on tape.

Sometime next week I should get a package from WEDU with DVDs that will show me what I have. Then I'll try to take the two hours or so of footage we shot and plan how to distill it into four minutes of interesting television.

WEDU Story Airs

A mere four months after we began shooting it, the first story I produced for Tampa’s PBS affiliate aired. "Radio Controlled Chaos" was featured in the September edition of WEDU’s A Gulf Coast Journal. You can watch it on WEDU’s web site. It’s the last story in the show and I don’t know if the video player will let you scroll past the others so I forgive you in advance if you don't wait long enough to watch.

Because of my work schedule, I oversaw almost none of the story's editing. The show producer took a pretty heavy ax to it, cutting all the material we trekked to Englewood a second time to shoot. That did not shock me. The photographer warned me that we were shooting too much material. He promised that even though I was told to script a story between five-and-a-half and six minutes long it would wind up running no more than three-and-a-half. I'm glad I didn't bet him. Its final running time was 3:40.

But the show producer, the host and apparently even the bigwigs at the station were happy; I got mileage reimbursed and the check from WEDU came less than a week after I submitted an invoice so I can't complain about the result.

We shoot another piece tomorrow that will reunite me with an old colleague named Bob Hansen. He was the sports shooter at WFLA-TV when I worked there as the weekend sports anchor. While I was gallivanting through Kentucky, Ohio and back here to Florida, he managed to stay employed at the same place. He occasionally does some freelance on the side for WEDU and he recommended me to the show producer.

I get to pay him back for the reference by giving him some freelance work. And I also get to work with a guy whose unique skills produced some of the best stories of my career when I worked at WFLA.

Whew!

I hadn't written about Monday's day doing traffic at WTSP and you might have construed the silence to mean disaster had happened. Fortunately, no. It went a little more smoothly than Friday, though the rust still shows.

More explanation and a couple of clips in the video file below. It's in Windows Media format and it's going to take a while to load after you click on the play button.


Portions courtesy WTSP-TV

Later today, I go to WEDU, Tampa's PBS affiliate, where we're scheduled to edit my first story for A Gulf Coast Journal. Considering I made my first arrangements to shoot this story in May, I'm especially eager to finally finish. I'm also curious to see how such a disconnected procedure comes together. I shot it with a photographer I met for the first time when he arrived at the shoot. The station mailed me DVDs of the tapes and I logged them and wrote the script at home by myself. The script approval process with the show producer happened by e-mail. E-mails with WEDU's production coordinator set our edit dates. Then I sent the script to the program's host Jack Perkins for him to record the narration. A brief e-mail exchange is the only interaction we had. He e-mailed an mp3 file of the recording to the station. Separately, I e-mailed a copy of the script to the editor, whom I had not met until yesterday. We were supposed to edit then but the editor got sidetracked by other projects. I was glad to learn that he had received the script and Jack's narration and it all made sense.

The story should be largely finished by the time I can get to the station after work today. I hope that the show producer correctly assessed the editor's ability to work unsupervised. If so, and the story turns out well, I'll want to produce more of them. Let's get this one finished first.

Weekend Wrap-Up

Saturday I had to complete shooting on a story for WEDU (backstory here). We had done the principal interviews earlier and shot nearly three hours of video of guys working on and racing their radio controlled cars. This shoot wouldn't take all day.

Despite the large amount of video we shot and the interviewees all having good things to say, the story was still missing something. The problem is that I had three different voices articulating basically same view. They were all middle-aged guys who had a passion for racing these cars. That's fine for a 90 second typical TV news story. But the story would exhaust itself long before the allotted running time for a five minute feature.

We went back looking for at least one more perspective. We found one in a hobby shop about a half mile from the track. Its owner opened the store at that location primarily because of its proximity to the track. This was important because the racers I had interviewed talked about how the county's support for the track came in part because it would draw people to downtown Englewood. A business that sells supplies for racing at the track opening there would be evidence of that.

We also interviewed a fan. Attendance still didn't meet the expectations we had been led to have but there were enough people to show that there was at least a crowd of some sort. The fan we talked to verified that more people do watch the races when it's cooler out. She was also a woman, which gives us some variety of voices in the story.

I haven't seen the tapes of Saturday's shoot yet but I feel much better about the story now.

Sunday, with a mountain of laundry to tackle, I spent most of the day playing guitar.

Big Room Boom

The tune above is a work in progress. I got the drums from the Sony Acid Music site. The free Acid project includes sound loops. Drums is where many of my recent tunes have started. I get the drums going, start playing along, keep going until a stumble across something I like than try to record it.

Pulse

Pulse is a simple tune (not like any of mine are terribly intricate) that provides a bed for me to play lead guitar over. I have another version that is much slower and I kept the same smooth lead guitar sound. The faster version might work better with a more distorted lead guitar.

Funky Mood Five

Funky Mood Five is the latest attempt to play the lead guitar part more precisely. This version also has a slightly different mix, with the synthesizer a little louder and the guitar toned down some.

Good Times With Nuge (V.4)

This one is also an attempt to tighten up a song I have posted here before. The differences are subtle but when you play something over and over again, you make little tweaks in how it goes and, I hope, play it a little better.

New Freelance Job Update

I've detailed the freelance field producing job I've started for WEDU, the PBS affiliate in Tampa. There's one part of the production process I didn't mention.

Before I can write the script, I have to watch all the tapes (almost three hours worth), transcribe the interviews and note all of the shots. That's called "logging" in TV parlance. Instead of having to arrange a time to do this at WEDU, the production manager has copies made on DVD and she sends them to me so I can log the tapes at home.

How about that? There's a part of this job I can do sitting in my underwear! Actually, I do all my jobs wearing underwear. Customarily, though, I wear other clothes on top of them. If you must know, I probably will do the same when I log the tapes (in their DVD form).

This should happen soon. The DVDs arrived this week. I sat down to log them only to discover that only one of them (the one with the footage shot from the "on-car" cam) had any audio. The production coordinator promised to send another set soon. I can verify that the video looks good -- at least from a cursory scan through them.

Logging is tedious and it's the least fun part about doing most stories. It's also one of the more important. The better you know the contents of your tapes, the better your script turns out usually. Logging the tapes often takes more time than writing the script.

There will be time to worry about that later. The DVDs will arrive soon enough. Perhaps this time I'll be able to hear them!

A New Freelance Job

Some a-hole with a "Choose Live" license plate cut me off at 80 mph on I-75 yesterday. (Note: This person is not necessarily an a-hole because his car sports a "Choose Life" license plate. It's probably coincidence.) If this idiot loves life so much, why was he driving as if he had a death wish? For himself and for me.

I was driving, or attempting to drive, to Englewood in southern Sarasota County to field produce my first story for A Gulf Coast Journal, a TV magazine show that airs on WEDU, the PBS affiliate in Tampa.

Field producing means doing everything a reporter does except that after I write the story, someone else will narrate it. In this case that will be the show's host Jack Perkins. He hosted a series on the cable channel A&E called Biography. That's how I know of him. He also used to be a network TV correspondent.

Our subject is the Sarasota Association of Radio Control Auto Racers, or SARCAR. "Middle aged men playing with toys," racer Dean Yiapis describes them. Races happen on a former tennis court converted into a track at the Englewood Recreation complex. Cars one-tenth the size of normal ones can exceed 30 mph on the track.


Cars are difficult to control and crashes happen routinely. One driver found himself bumping into walls so often he named his operation "Oops Racing." Unlike full size car crashes, the drivers always survive. Usually the cars do too.


Photographer Alex Gazio shoots most of the story on a Sony CineAlta camera, an ultra high-end HD camera which costs around $120,000. But perhaps the most dramatic video comes from a small Sony HandyCam costing only a few hundred dollars. Alex ties it to the chassis of one of the cars and gets an "in-car camera" view. He played back the video and the shots of other cars from that perspective is super cool.

Now it's a matter of logging the nearly three hours of footage we shot and writing a script. This will be interesting because I've rarely written stories for other people and never have I done it for someone whose pace and delivery are so different from mine. Not only do I have to think in someone else's voice, what will be especially challenging is matching Jack's slow and contemplative delivery (think Charles Kuralt) to a story about racing cars.

Jack won't be at the shoot. He won't see the tapes. All he will know of the story is the script I send. He won't be able to adjust his tone to match the tone of the story. I've never met the man so I have no idea if he'd even care to try. So I have to write it in a way that suits his normal delivery.