Andrew's Local News Adventures Continue

I started working in local TV in Eugene back in late October. In under ten months, I've been promoted twice, from part time to full time technical director, and then from technical director to director.

I had been directing the weekend news shows -- the simplest and least watched news shows, where they put all the newbies like me -- for only a month or so when the possibility of another promotion reared its head. A higher-up director, the guy who hired me in fact, moved to Spokane.

It's not clear if I'll get promoted to the weekday 5 and 11 o' clock directing spots, and if I had to guess I'd say the odds were against me from the start because of my relative inexperience. But, in the interim while the people upstairs figure out what to do, I've been filling in on the 5 o' clock show, which is about 10 times more complex than the weekend shows I'm used to, and it has been awesome.

That's the setup. Now you're ready to read about yesterday. Press on, true believer.

The last time I had an adrenaline rush on the job was when I started, as technical director on the morning show. My station's morning show is the most highly-rated one in town -- more watched than the other two stations combined, even though we're the #2 station overall. At any rate, there's an easy-to-understand thrill in live TV, when you know that if you make a mistake it will be instantly noticed by thousands of people simultaneously.

After a couple of weeks I stopped making mistakes, and the adrenaline stopped flowing, which is a relief, because the morning show lasts 90 minutes. When I learned how to direct for the weekend show, I didn't have the same butterflies. As you probably realize, I'm a pretty confident guy.

Well, weekends are pretty easy. There's one anchor, who also serves as a producer, and she's great at both, which means less work for me. The show is divided into five predictable blocks:

1. The first and longest block is mostly just a string of "VO-SOTs" as we call them, or "V.O. Bytes" is another one I've heard. VO is "voice over" and SOT is "sound on tape," meaning a taped soundbyte, usually under ten seconds long. Other than commercial breaks, VO-SOTs are the most routine part of the job. A news show at its simplest will be just VO-SOT after VO-SOT.

   Also during this block (for the 6 o'clock, but not the 11 o' clock) there's a reporter, who shows up once during the show, either "on set" (next to the anchor at the desk) or, as she says, "cam nining it" (reporting her story from camera 9 in the newsroom, a camera whose only function must be to prove that there's a newsroom back there).



2. Block 2 is for weather. The meteorologist, who is, impossibly, much younger than me, predicts the future for three minutes while I sit back and relax, turning on my headset every thirty seconds or so to give a time cue.


3. Block 3 is like a very short first block, with just one or two stories, both read by the anchor. National or world news might get put here if it's not big.


4. Block 4 is sports. This is the hardest part to direct. There's a lot of ad libbing, so you have to use telepathy to figure out when to go from one tape to the next; and, depending on the sports anchor, there's a danger that he might go way too long and leave us with no time for the last block. I remember a weekend broadcast (back when I was a part-timer, and therefore was just doing audio on the weekend show) that ended with a fifth block that was exactly 1-second long and consisted of the anchor and the sports anchor looking into the camera and saying, and I quote, "Bye!"


5. If you have enough time, the last block has a story, a ten-second weather update, and a goodbye from the anchor, the sports anchor, and the meteorologist. If you don't have time, the first two are expendible.

That's a lot of set-up, I know. But I want you to fully appreciate the complexity of the 5 o' clock weekday show, and specifically the one I directed yesterday.

Like the weekend shows, the weekday 5 is a half-hour show broken into five segments, and the first one is the longest. There's no sports -- that shows up in the hour-long 6 o' clock show. And instead of one anchor, there's two -- a seemingly minor variation, but it's another thing to think about when you have to specify whose microphone should be turned on and who should be reading what.

But the biggest difference of all is the remotes. Whereas the weekend show has one reporter, the weekdays could have half a dozen, some in distant bureaus like Coos Bay and Roseburg and Corvallis. All of these people need to be coordinated by me, and they all seem to show up in the first block, which makes for some hectic directing.

My confidence started waning around 4:15 yesterday when I still didn't have scripts in front of me. It takes me about 15 minutes to mark a half-hour of scripts with the complex monologue I'll be giving -- commands to the audio person, the switcher, the tape ops people, the floor crew, and to the ominous Master Control. Yesterday's would take even longer, because I could see from the rundown that it involved a lot more remotes than usual, and hence was much more complex than any show I had done before. Even scarier, one of the remote reporters wasn't one of our people, but somebody on loan from another affiliate. I needed time to talk to all these people, check their microphones and make sure they could hear me and knew when they'd be on air.

The first block would have an on-set, and a reporter at cam 9; Ben at the Coos Bay bureau on receiver 27; Nicole in Corvallis on receiver 3; Casey, reporting from the fairgrounds, on receiver 1, and she would be handing her microphone to meteorologist Stephanie for the weather segments, which presented its own problems; and this guy, whose name apparently started with 'P' (Pete? Paul?), God-knows-where, reporting on a fire on receiver 17.

When I finally did get scripts, I found that many pages were blank -- they hadn't been written yet. That can be frustrating. I could mark them immediately, but then someone will come in later with reprinted pages and I'll want to mark those. It sounds like a minor concern, but it's important to know what a reporter is going to say and when they expect you to go to each tape.

About fifteen minutes before the show started, we learned that Pete or Paul or whatever wasn't going to be on eceiver 17 at all, but rather on receiver 3, Nicole's receiver. That meant we should check P's microphone now so that we could then switch receiver 3 over to Corvallis, since Nicole's story came before P's. Then, in the middle of the first block, Master Control would have to switch receiver 3 over to this guy whose name I couldn't figure out.

Unbeknownst to me, this receiver-swap was necessitated by a problem getting tape from Pete/Paul. First of all, we thought he'd be introducing a package -- a minute-or-more full-sound tape with narration on it -- but instead it was going to be a VO-SOT, which we were supposed to receive at 4:45. Trouble on our end delayed the transfer, so my producer -- who is, thankfully, the best producer we currently have -- was not in the booth sitting next to me at 4:56:25, two minutes and three seconds from broadcast time, when my confidence began to falter.

I had been unable to contact Pete or Paul on receiver 3. We could see him and hear him, but I couldn't communicate with him. I was sure my producer knew how, but she had vanished. The floor director offered to fetch her, but I decided against it -- wherever the producer was, she was probably doing something important. I had Master Control switch receiver 3 over to Corvallis, and the show began.

The 5 o' clock starts with a bang called the Grabber. It's a brief tease of three or four stories, super-fast, and often with bureau people involved. It starts with an animation, which reveals -- via an effect called a "lumens key", which replaces the "pure black" on the tape with whatever we want to replace it with -- to a VO. Then we wipe to Nicole, then to another tape, and finally to Stephanie, before mixing to the shotbox animation that identifies and opens the show.

In a span of something like fifteen seconds, here's what I say:

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"Stand by, ready Y¹ revealing to A and theme, roll Y, sting it², ready A roll A, key their mics³, cue⁴, stand by⁵, ready receiver 3, key Nicole, wipe, go Nicole, ready B, stand by⁶, key anchors, roll B wipe, ready receiver one, stand by⁷, key Stephanie, wipe, go Stephine, ready shotbox open, roll it, and mix.

¹A, B, X, and Y are tape decks. Y is the backup deck, used for animations or story-adds. Why X and Y? Because C and D sound too much like B. Also, they call eleven "yo" in craps because it sounds like seven.

²"Sting it" is my cue to the audio person to play a musical theme that starts suddenly.

³The audio person knows I mean to turn on the anchors' microphones specifically. I've also heard directors say to "open" mics, but I think it's important to save the extra syllable.

⁴I'm telling the floor director to tell the anchors to start talking.

⁵I'm speaking this directly into Nicole's ear by pressing a button corresponding to her earpiece.

⁶No special button this time. The floor director will inform the anchors that their mics are about to be hot.

⁷You guessed it -- I'm talking to Stephanie, the meteorologist, on receiver 1.

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That's the first fifteen seconds. If I forget any of those cues, I'll stumble and start messing up other cues, and the whole thing can unravel and look like a mess on screen.

I have to hop in the shower and ride my bike to work now. (I've been trying to get some excercise, you see.) So, long story short, somehow everything worked out. We switched receiver 3 after Nicole's story, we figured out the cues for Pete/Paul's VO and SOT even though we didn't have a complete script from him, Stephanie managed to hand Casey her microphone without both of them bursting into flames or something, and we got through the whole show without a single mistake. I still think I'm not likely to get promoted, which is a shame, because the 5 o'clock provides a pulse-pounding challenge I enjoy a great deal. But at least nobody can say I'm not ready.

Andrew - 2:22 PM