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

40/29 is the friskiest station in the entire western Arkansas Nielsen DMA. Need proof? Even after the May ratings period ended, we did another installment of “Caught Cruising For Sex” - which meant more blurring, and another promo, both on very short notice. I must have been feeling a little bit punchy, because I produced the promo originally with as retro-funky a music bed as I could find in our music library, and so help me, I was quite deliberately thinking “porno music.” I actually expected the music bed to be changed before it hit the air this time, so it was just a little bit of a joke (and the spot was done very quickly because of the extra day needed to get legal approval and so forth, so it wasn’t a case of popping a joke at the worst possible time. Once again, here’s a “producer’s cut” that never made it to the air…thank goodness. And let’s not talk about the blurring.

This is going to be a very unusual entry for this section - something I haven’t done before. This spot was changed rather significantly from the version that I finished and turned in, and while I agree with some of the changes (replacing one of the sound bites, for example), there was one big one I didn’t buy into. This story dealt with a serious issue - i.e. whether or not cashiers even bother to glance at your credit cards and your ID to make sure they match - but was written in a humorous, attention-grabbing way. I originally put some lively and maybe just a little bit silly music on the spot to reinforce the fun angle, but when it aired it had a far more serious music bed that seemed to strain against everything that the spot was trying to do visually and in the script. So for this spot, I created an extra copy of the sequence in the Avid and put the original music bed back on the spot - and I still think it fits better. Therefore, this, if you like, is the “producer’s cut.” Is it too silly? You decide. Another bane of my existence cropped up here, as the credit card, and the signage identifying the stores into which we sent our “undercover reporters,” all had to be blurred. Since we weren’t dealing with station talent, we weren’t dealing with people who understood that things needed to be held still to facilitate that blurring.

Oh, and let’s not forget that for every one of these stories where footage has to be blurred or otherwise altered for the promo, everything in the story itself has to receive a similar treatment. I’ll give you one guess who gets to do that task.

It sure beats the wax out of ear candling though.

For the second year running, the station teamed up with a local document shredding service to sponsor a “public shredding day,” which was teased heavily by a week of stories on the subject of identity theft and how to prevent it. My favorite promo from that week was this nice little shocker story about how personal information could be recovered, with virtually no effort, from the dumpster of city and state offices, such as the courthouse. The treatment was fairly straightforward in post, and I still get a chuckle from the still below - you won’t believe what reporter Mike McCormick found! He found himself in an early 80s music video, by the look of it!

Oh, and all the documents shown in the story had to be blurred. How I made it through May sweeps this year without picking up a drinking habit is almost inexplicable.

Following right on the heels of the park story was yet another ride-along-with-the-cops piece, this time about the rising frequency of elderly drivers hitting the road under the influence in a local town noted for being a retirement community. In a way, this was a more interesting story, but it presented many of the same problems - again, before you can even begin putting together the spot proper, you have to animate blurs over the faces of the drivers being stopped (not all of whom were even remotely drunk). To speed things along, I tried to make my life a little easier by adding other obscuring elements to the video, including duplicating each shot in a fuzzy, slightly-zoomed-in form to give it a dreamy look. It also helped that the graphics I designed for this spot took the form of huge, colorful banners that would cover quite a bit of real estate on the screen.

Nothing says “sweeps” like exposès on vice. Fort Smith’s police department conducts frequent stings in public parks, trying to round up men who are trying to proposition other men for sex. We had an exclusive in this case, one of our photogs tagged along with the cops for a couple of days, and we did capture a few of these busts on tape. And, of course, every bit of it had to be blurred - we couldn’t show plainclothes undercover cops, we couldn’t show the perps, and we couldn’t show a nearby business that cropped up in some shots. This basically doubles the production time of the spot: setting up animation sequences to blur out everyone’s faces, and to have these blurs track with every person in the shot as both the people and the camera move, is an extremely time-consuming process, and after having to build an elaborate move to keep everything concealed even through a bunch of rapid zooms in and out, you’re about ready to smack somebody. Spots like this also have an additional audience that most promos for “tamer” stories don’t: everything has to be checked out by the station’s attorneys, and if they say something needs to be changed, then it needs to be changed.

Much to my chargin, this was the first of several spots like this in a one-month period. On one hand, stories - and promos - like this are good for the station. They demonstrate a capacity and a willingness to cover hard news (a phrase I really don’t want to spend too much time contemplating in connection with this particular story) instead of puff pieces about ear candling. But stacking a bunch of spots like this back-to-back in the schedule, all needing to be produced quickly by one person in the same shift as the usual nightly news topicals and nightly web content, is enough to make one think about running screaming into the night.

The “Truth About Teacher Pay” spot was one of those that arrived with not a lot of footage: basically, the footage I had, unless I fell back on some far-too-frequently used ABC and Hearst stock footage of students and schools, was the interview clip in the middle of the spot. I grabbed some graphics elements and set about trying to make my way through the whole spot that way, with all of the text, and even a heavily treated version of the interview, being “drawn” on the blackboard. I placed the school desk graphic in the foreground as an animated element to try to give a sense of scale and depth, though it wound up looking more or less like what it is: a 2-D cut-out.