:: Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer ::

Another example of my “unofficial” early production work at Fox 46/15 was a simple graphic, used for legal IDs on Christmas Eve ‘95, tracking Santa Claus across an old satellite weather map. It’s amazing what sheer boredom, and a lot of free time on one’s hands, can do for a career.

Our live annual coverage of the 1995 Fort Smith Christmas Parade was a big deal, but virtually no time was allocated to creating an open for the program. It was assumed that we’d use video from the 1994 parade…until that video turned up missing. In a big hurry - literally the evening before the parade - I devised a Lightwave animation which, owing to the enormous number of on-screen objects (namely snowflakes), took seventeen hours to render. The thing was put together on tape about thirty minutes before air. It looked much more polished and professional than anyone expected it to, given the time frame involved.

Fort Smith/Van Buren district Addy Silver Award Winner, Video/Film Animation category, 1996

Women’s collegiate basketball may not seem like a big-league programming acquisition, but it was for out little UPN/local sports station. The Ladybacks were kicking butt in the Southeast Conference and the word-of-mouth on the team’s performance was gaining a lot of interest. KFDF did several live and tape-delayed broadcasts from the Ladybacks’ home games in Fayetteville, Arkansas over the ‘95-’96 season, and this one-minute Lightwave 4.0 animation opened each game. Featuring roughly 28 seconds of animation and a 32 second video/audio pad for sponsor billboards, the animation followed a basketball’s journey from the hardwood into orbit (no one said it really had to make a lot of sense so long as it was eye-catching), a blazing re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere, and a perfect landing in northwest Arkansas. Due to the limitations of our memory-challenged Video Toaster 4000 (and the fact that this machine was no longer serviced by anyone circa 1995), the animation was composed in four-second segments which were then pieced together as seamlessly as possible on tape. While that may seem like a pain to assemble, the modular nature of the animation also made it possible to swap out key segments for new animations, and a slightly abbreviated version of the same animated also served as our open for coverage of Westark College’s men’s and women’s basketball that season. This animation also won an Addy Silver in the Film and Video Animation category.