Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Working for a penny an hour I lived through a classic case of "the dog ate my homework" yesterday, only the dog was a camera and the homework wasn't mine. Ross Smilko, a 2nd-year student at Milwaukee Area Technical College, his uncle Gene and I were trying to tape some stand-ups for his TV show, "Strictly Outdoors." Ross asked me to host the show, and I agreed to do it. This is something those of us who work at Milwaukee Public Television do from time to time as volunteers. We were on location on the Monches Segment of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, where the day before Ross and Gene had picked out several good spots to do the stand-ups (introductions to segments of the show). Anyway, we had just finished the first of four 15-second stand-ups and set up to do the second one, when the camera shut down. It refused to play the tape, wouldn't open and in fact the LCD screen read "no tape" when Ross tried to fire it up again. We spent an hour fiddling with the camera, half of it on Gene's cell phone with engineers and students back at MPTV, but nothing worked, so we packed it in and headed for the vehicles. Ross had planned out carefully what he wanted to accomplish. We had hauled a kayak, a shotgun, a fishing rod and a couple changes of clothes down the trail for the four stand-ups and now had to haul all the gear back out again. On the trail on the way out, I found a dime and pocketed it. We agreed to come back today to try again. So this afternoon, we drove the 50-some miles back to Monches, dragged out all the gear and the camera and had another go at it. This time, things went smoothly and we finished all four segment intros in about two hours of shooting. That's often what it takes to do a minute of TV. Two hours of shooting today, three hours of attempted shooting yesterday, and a half-day site survey the day before that. Counting my travel time, I spent about 10 hours to get a minute of useable video. I had agreed to do it for nothing, but since I found that dime, I actually made a penny an hour. Good thing gas prices dropped this week! Seriously, Ross is putting together a pretty good show. It features an ice-fishing segment for northern pike on Okauchee Lake, a pheasant hunt in Brownsville and a Canadian fishing trip for pike and walleyes. You can watch it, along with a bunch of other MPTV student productions, on Channel 36, some time on Saturday, May 7. It airs at 11 a.m. on Sat., May 7 and repeats at 5:30 a.m. on Sun., May 8. Tune in and let me know what you think! Later... 10:02:47 PM    comment []