Computers arrived today. Sixteen pallets of them. Ninety-six machines. We unloaded the pallets and took the individual computer boxes out of the larger ones. We put them in temporary storage, waiting for the holidays or some other slow time to install them in our building. (Slow time. The next slow time is scheduled to be three weeks spread out over next summer.) Also, we have 80-something more machines due in next week.
Computers are strenuous exercise around the office. We have six computer lab style classrooms and the giant computer lab.
I remember when the now old ones went in as new ones. It’s an experience that lives with you. How the guy in charge of all of those machines — and their software and the many updates — is able to keep it all straight in his head never ceases to amaze me.
Here’s the first sports show that they shot last night. It’s all the highlights fit to highlight.
The second show will be up on Friday or so.
And now I have to record an interview for the podcast. And then I’ll produce it. And I’ll share it with you, and the rest of the world, tomorrow.
(Update: It was a great subject, and an interesting interview. I think you’re going to like it.)
Let us talk about sports shows. Here are two of them. First, this is your standard issue updates-from-the-desk, reports-from-the-field highlight show, Hoosier Sports Nite.
And this is The Toss Up, your standard issue sports talk show. Four people sitting and talking at great depth, and with some degree of fandom, about the upcoming Major League Baseball playoffs.
Now, The Toss Up dates to 2016, when I got here. It has, more or less, always been shot as a show in-sequence. They do little pitches to another person for a sidebar, or a package, and they will sometimes shoot those out of order, but, generally it just makes sense to shoot it in that straightforward way. It has always felt natural and done in realtime, over the course of the four regular hosts it has had in those six years.
The first show above, Hoosier Sports Nite, is 11 years (or so) old. It has always, at least in my experience, had elements produced out of sequence. This means that if the anchor “pitches” to a reporter in another part of the studio, it’s an editing trick. The reporter part was done earlier, or later, and they just put it together in post-production. There’s nothing wrong with this. It happens in the industry all the time on programs that aren’t live. (Sometimes, for example, the person doing the pitching is live and the person catching the pitch is on tape.) There are different ways and reasons for doing that. They’re all legitimate. From our perspective, it usually has a lot to do with practical reasons like time, or our experience and so on. (We’re all still learning in this shop, of course.)
So imagine my pride when, last night, they produced Toss Up as they normally do — timing segments and getting in and out in a logical way and leaving me only two or three constructive criticism points to make — and then they did Hoosier Sports Nite straight through, a show produced truly live-to-tape. They did two bits over to correct small errors, also not unusual, but it’s all there as one live show.
I stopped by their post-production meeting to tell them so. To thank them and congratulate them for their work. It’s no small thing, doing a live show, and they’ve been building to this for a while.
When they rolled out the first episode of The Toss Up, the talk show, this semester, I noticed they’d changed the last of the original bits of the show. I remember all the components well, as it was the first show* I helped IUSTV bring to life. Every year something would change on this particular show. The logo improved. They added lower thirds or sharper segments. The last thing to go was the music. And that got updated this year. The guy that really brought this show to life, Jacques, he’d be pleased with the program today. He specifically wanted to start this show and give it to the people that came after him and let them run with it. And they have! The music was really his thing. He’d probably like that his music stuck around the longest from the original show. But now, aside from the name of the show and one line at the very end, they’ve organically grown the premise of his project, just as he’d hoped.
When I was watching them shoot Sports Nite last night, and talking about it and congratulating them after that, I was thinking of the through line of that show. Jacques was the first sports director I knew here. He graduated and then came Ben. Ben produced and improved those shows, graduated, and is now a producer at ESPN. When he moved to Bristol there came Auston. He produced and improved those shows, graduated, and went into the local sports writing business. The next year Michael was the sports director. He ran the shows, had his senior year in the studio cut short by Covid closing campus, but they grew a ton nevertheless, and he’s now doing sports at his hometown TV station in Iowa. So Drew and Jackson moved into the sports director roles after Michael. Drew graduated and is doing news in Fort Wayne now. Another Michael came along to help Jackson out and he just graduated and is on the market. Jackson will soon be graduating. Each of those guys have always told me what they liked about what the previous sports director did, and what they wanted to do differently. And as I stood there, beaming with a little pride, I could see all of that distinctly running through the night’s work. Those sports directors, and all the women and men working on those shows, were a part of making that particular episode a special little effort.
The thing is, all of this hard work is foundational. And, sometimes, you necessarily have to wait to see the development. It just keep building, though. From here it’ll grow through a room full of talented young folks learning from today’s upperclassmen, because those sports directors I mentioned have always aspired to raise the bar. It’s all cumulative. If all those now-graduated people had a mysterious little chill, or felt the hairs stand up on the necks, last night, I suspect they’ll get a more profound sensation when we have our next big moment. The thing is, it won’t be long now.
*Since I’ve been their adviser — and helper and cheerleader and all the other things — we have created seven new shows from the very air. Five of them are still running.
This is Ray Charles’ birthday. He was born in Georgia. I saw him when I was a little boy at Opryland, in Tennessee. My mother and my grandmother were at the park. And, to be honest, it was probably just an excuse to get out of the sun and heat for an hour or so. But, as I recall, they opened the doors for general admission seating and I, being smaller than everyone waiting to get inside, weaved through the crowd and got us seats close to the stage and right in the center. Maybe six or eight rows back.
Pretty great first concert.
Charles came on from stage right, sat at his piano, and The Raelettes came in behind him. At some point my mother leaning over and saying “I remember, he was old when I was young!”
He would have been about 54 or 55 at the time, my mother was in her mid-20s. That sentence is now hilarious.
He played to the crowd for a nice long matinee set. He leaned way back on his stool. He sang all of the songs you’d expect. He wailed on Hit the Road Jack. I remember that clearly. This isn’t from that show, but a concert about two years before.
I’m sure my grandmother knew some of his songs. Probably some of the country catalog and the stuff that, by then, had become American standards. I wonder what she thought about the show.
Here’s the sports show from last night. It’s just a barrel full of IU sports. What transpired, and what’s coming up. It’s all on Hoosier Sports Nite.
And here is one of the planters out front of Franklin Hall. This area, in the Old Crescent, is one of the campus highlights, and it’s always photogenic. The landscape and facilities people are putting out their best fall colors. They always do terrific work on campus. Just imagine this sort of thing all over the heavily landscaped parts of a sprawling campus.
We’re waiting for them to return my call about whether they work on private residences. I’ll let you know.
IU / television / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on This headline got changed because of an error in the original 16 Sep 21
I spent all day wrestling with Premiere Pro. In truth I spent a solid three hours wrestling with the editing software today. But, if you fight a program, in vein and without resolution, it just feels like all day.
I keep having this decidedly unfun lower third problem in Premiere Pro. No one within earshot knows how I can fix it. (That .ai is supposed to be a logo, not test bars.)
Really, it just puts me behind on arbitrary deadlines I’ve set for myself on varying projects.
(Update: Over the weekend I had an epiphany and tried it the next Monday. And it worked! It was the highlight of Monday, oddly enough.)
Here are the sports shows from last night. All the highlights and updates from the last week of Hoosier sports.
And if you need 20-plus minutes of talk on collegiate soccer, you need this program right here. Sharp analysis, if you ask me. (It’s sort of implied that you asked me, since we’re on my site, after all.)
And that’ll do it for today. Come back tomorrow, though. We’ll get your weekend started right by talking about … research.
This was the view on my morning walk. My morning walk … it sounds so casual. So routine. Perhaps it seems even a bit philosophical. But I don’t usually afford myself a morning walk. Perhaps I should. Instead I opt for more sleep. There’s never enough sleep.
But a morning walk does sound like a fine luxury, particularly as the weather turns a bit milder, if only for a short while. But this was no morning walk. It was a trip with purposes. I walked to the dentist, who has his office just down the street from our house. And if you think that doesn’t stick in your head each time you go by you’re fooling yourself. Every car trip, every bike ride, every run: did you brush enough before you came this way?
He has a new promotion. Follow him on Instagram, and you can win an iPad. Why not. The dental hygienist that works with me is a lovely woman. Her son is a freshman in college this year. And she and I usually discuss TV shows we’re watching. I assume she keeps notes on her clients. I’d mentioned, earlier this year, a great place to go whitewater rafting and she asked if I’d been anywhere this year. I expected more TV talk, or SCUBA diving talk or of the other things we’ve all mentioned in the past.
This is my third regular visit since the pandemic began.
It’s still weird to consider. Please lean over me and poke around my mouth with your pointy instruments which you have, no doubt, left in the nuclear autoclave out back for weeks between patients. You feel most … vulnerable.
This time last year they took my temperature at the door. Today they didn’t even point to a sign that asked if you’ve been having sickly symptoms.
Anyway, all went well with the appointment. And I hope I win that iPad. You can never have enough glowing electronics, no?
Saw this colorful little branch on the walk back.
After which we drove to campus. The Yankee to teach and me to sit in the office and do office things. It’s a carpool experience while her car is in the shop. She should get it back in the next day or two. Tomorrow she’s stealing mine altogether. So her car can’t get back to us quickly enough, you see.
I walked under this American sweetgum tree on campus. The breeze was blowing at the time.
The prickly little fruits of a sweetgum always take me right back to the gravel roads of childhood and running across such a tree is always a treat. Today, in the breeze, it looked like the leaves were waving.
Studio last night, as you might recall. One of the shows they produced has found its way online. First sports show of the season. From here, I’m sure, they’ll start to flesh things out as they go and grow.
And there will be another show to see soon. It’s a talk show and they discussed fantasy football at some length. You can find all those tips here tomorrow.
