Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer

In early ’95, KPBI launched a nightly five-minute weather forecast with Mike Burgess, and I got to be Mike’s producer for much of his one-year reign before he bailed out for a similar gig at NBC 24/51. The year Mike anchored our news-less weather segment was like a golden time at Fox 46, and our working relationship was an example of that – Mike and I spent many a sleepless night at the station in the springtime, with him in the studio and me in the control room. The two screens you see here also show the on-screen warning system I devised with the combination of a digital video effects box and an outdated Video Toaster, which while it was not longer useful in production could still put text on a screen. The names of our viewing area’s counties were in grey along the left side of the screen, unless the warning/watch currently being displayed applied to the county in question, in which case that county would be highlighted. And since we used a DVE instead of a bug, our system didn’t obscure any of the picture, a big plus with viewers. This was in the day and age before the modern marvels of TV weather gear which dominate newscasts (and promo time) these days, and it was before the day when every other station in a given market had its own doppler. The shots above were taken in the wee hours of April 15, 1995, when a violent storm system rolled through – and we managed to kick ass despite our low-tech approach (the Toaster-driven on-screen warning system required full-time manual control). At one point, lucky viewers everywhere got to hear me lean in the studio door and whisper “Tornado warning, Adair County!” as loud as I could without just speaking up normally – this was a station that didn’t have an IFB anywhere in the building. It may seem odd to brag about having to do things that way, but we all pulled together and made it work.

It’s not every day that a wet-behind-the-ears, 23-year-old promo producer gets to create the entire image branding campaign for a whole new station. UPN 32 in Fort Smith didn’t even start out as a UPN affiliate, though it was always intended to be one at some point. UPN 32 started out as “Sports 32,” and in lieu of network programming of any kind, as many local, regional and national syndicated sporting events as possible were crammed into the schedule. Not even half a year passed before “Sports 32″ became UPN 32, and right from the beginning I was stockpiling graphic elements for such an eventuality. Indeed, the original KFDF logo, a multi-colored hexagon, was intended to play well alongside UPN’s geometric logo. The original logo was created in the Targa TIPS+ paint program, while the first UPN 32 legal IDs incorporated animated elements from Lightwave 4.0, composited with the Video Toaster 4000.

Sometimes it seemed as though management couldn’t decide which logo they liked. Having completed a year on the air with the original, home-made hexagon logo, an update was requested, and the initial result was a slightly different hexagon – essentially an updating of the original, rendered in Lightwave 4.0 on the Toaster with a metallic texture to match UPN’s new metallic version of their own logo. That logo survived through fall 1996, at which point it was superceded by a logo outsourced from a local ad agency. At various times, all three logos could still be seen on the air inside of the same commercial break due to the tremendous time pressure on rolling out new promos vs. updating the existing ones – not a very smooth rollout. (And I hate to sound like I’m a bunch of sour grapes, but the agency-produced logo even put the UPN shapes in the wrong order.)