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On a Friday night, a bunch of college students chose to spend several hours in a new television studio:
On a Friday night, on homecoming weekend, they could have been anywhere. But there they were.
And, for a moment, I sat at the news desk:
Felt like old times, even if it was a simple microphone check.
Just another beautiful day on campus:
Took that picture from The Yankee’s office on the fourth floor. For a moment, I was as tall as a tree. Also, I was in my wife’s office, which is just a few feet from mine, and that’s nice.
I’ve shown you a bit of the television studio and control room that they’ve built in the new Media School building. I should also mention this fine little radio production booth:
It has windows on three sides, so it can be a fishbowl broadcast studio, and a podcast and production booth. There is an adjoining production booth on the other side of one of the windows. And still more of editing bays and production rooms being finished downstairs. This is one incredible facility IU has here. And they let me play with all the fancy toys in these rooms. It is a pretty charmed thing, really.
And tonight, we were back in the television studio. We do sports shows on Wednesday and Thursday. But on Tuesdays we do a news show and a pop culture, fashion, what’s happening kind of show. I’m sitting in a control room full of talented young people, and there’s plenty more talent in the studio next door:
Here’s that show now:
Right away you can tell this is a beautiful campus. I’ve seen my fair of attractive ones, but Indiana’s is one handsome place. It is hard to pick the best spot because there are many strong candidates. Today, however, this is my favorite spot on campus:
That’s a little stand of trees right next to our building, in Dunn Meadow. The picture itself is also presently the emergency backup version of the front page of my site.
If you’re on a real browser you’ll see a video. If you’re viewing it on your phone or pad, you’ll see the above picture as the background. What I like most about it is that I can change it easily and regularly. So, more visual, more video.
This evening, the work continues in my home office. This project will never get done. I have a good helper, though:
She might also be why the work goes slowly.
The technical director is the guy that sits at the big console in a television control room and makes it happen. When a new camera shot is taken, that’s the technical director. When there’s a graphic on the screen, the Chyron person made it, but the TD put it on the screen. When there’s a video package playing, that’s on the screen because of our friend the technical director. That person sits here:
This is a Grass Valley switcher and it is massive and impressive. It took about a full week of intensive training to get most of it down. And it will do everything we will conceivably ask of it and more. One of the TDs on one of our student shows was comparing this new control room to their old digs. Used to be, he said, he could sit in one seat and do three or four of the roles without moving. Now, in this new studio, a state-of-the-art facility, a full-on production requires a team of nine or 10 crew members. So the short version is: better programming, more training opportunities, win-win.
Such is the dedication to the broadcast students that Indiana University and the Media School have built such an impressive facility. It is a neat treat to be a small part of that. And if I am sitting at that switcher one day and I disappear into the past or transport myself to Mars, just know it was a human error on my part.
View from my run this evening:
An easy three-miler to get through the middle of the week.
