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

Ironically, for all this talk of a new Avid and May sweeps, the old Avid actually got some serious action toward the end of its tenure. The first two spots of May sweeps were done on the Media Composer (or, as I had taken to calling it by this point, the Media Composter). Each spot promoted one night of a two-part special report about Helen Walton, the widow of Sam Walton and matriarch of the Wal-Mart empire; the first night was quite a big deal, featuring an interview with Rob Walton, the first interview any member of the family had granted to the local media in something like ten years. A great many old films and photos were gathered for this as well, and I gave all of these - up to and including about one second of the Rob Walton interview footage - a sepia-tone treatment and dropped a bit of a paint-spackle texture on the footage to try to drop even more of a hint of antiquity. Well, I say it was sepia-tone - the old Avid was having some serious problems displaying colors properly, and so the actual spot is almost more of a garish orange. For the second night’s promo, I tinted the archival footage blue instead - blue was about the only thing the old Avid could reliably give us with graphics or effects anymore. The end tags for both nights were actually done on my home computer - actually, at this point, more often than not I was using Paint Shop Pro either at home or at work to not only work around the old Avid’s maddeningly slim selection of fonts, but its increasingly cantankerous title tool as well.

As it turned out, the tornado spot wouldn’t be my last POP spot that week. April 21st fell on a Wednesday, and there were severe weather events on Thursday and Friday as well. Friday, as it turned out, was the deal-breaker, dumping a lot of rain across the entire viewing area and, especially in extreme northwest Arkansas, causing some serious flooding. This flooding spot is a bit more dramatic and it’s more of a news piece than a weather piece since there were people dying and people being rescued. There was a lot of web coverage of the event, and I was responsible for that too. Needless to say, I didn’t get a lot of sleep that week, but I can count myself lucky that I wasn’t having to swim home.

I have a special, personal connection to the 21st of April - in this market, that’s The Day The Tornado Hit in 1996. 8 years later, some effort was being put into planning anniversary stories and packages to look back at that event, but they never got to air, because on April 21st, 2004, a major severe storm system blasted through eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas, spitting tornadoes and funnel clouds at what seemed like every opportunity. Normally, POP (proof-of-performance) spots are left up to the day shift, and specifically the promotions manager, but he was out that week, and so it was up to me to cough up some kind of a POP spot in his absence. The voice for our weather POPs tended to be drawn from several fairly nonspecific scripts voiced by Eric Gordon, and this one was no exception, so it comes out a little bit generic. But it sells the benefits of our coverage to the viewer: the severe weather event was predicted over a day in advance, and when it finally hit the station was all over it.