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

For my final promo of sweeps, we had a story borrowed from Hearst/Argyle sister station WYFF about promotional coupon codes for internet shopping sites. Originally this was going to be a normal topical (much like the Thanksgiving promo), but it was a Monday Night Football night (the story ran on Tuesday, November 29th), and I thought that still being in sweeps it’d be a good time to throw a little something extra at the spot. All of the footage comes from WYFF’s package, which we simply revoiced with one of our reporters.

I don’t normally put daily topicals up for all to see - they’re so very often routine, and there’s always the problem of having the right footage to go with a story that’s Happening Right Now (I’m not a big fan of Anchor At A Desk promos.) But this is a case where everything came together the way it did almost by accident. There was actually copy written for this promo, but it never got voiced for one reason or another - and then the interview sound turned out to be strong enough to support the whole thing. I dropped in a slightly different music bed than we’d normally put on a topical, and it just worked. File this one under “happy accidents.”

From a journalistic standpoint, this was my favorite story of the November sweeps period, basically examining police claims that a large, recently-opened casino just across the Arkansas/Oklahoma border had already become a hotspot of illegal drug activity. We had arrests and police checkpoint searches on tape, which meant plenty of blurring, but we also had some stuff that I would describe as “money shots” - such as the cop searching under a car seat and coming up with a handful of pot. I used some fruit machine video as a background element which, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I’d do again - when it’s moving, it’s almost distracting from the main video, which shouldn’t happen.

This was one of those stories that was dogged by a lack of usable footage - we had interviews with a juvenile corrections officer and a rehab clinic employee, and footage of the drug test kits themselves, but none of it was blow-the-door-down exciting. For much of the promo, what you see if stock footage of drugs that ABC sent to its affiliate stations sometime around 2000. I simply cooked up the titles in 3-D and animated them to follow the motion of the camera as best I could for those segments.

It wouldn’t be sweeps at 40/29 if we didn’t need to blur a few stories. This first one involved our cameras following an undercover volunteer “decoy” or two, minors who help police out by going into various liquor stores, restaurants and other venues and try to buy alcoholic beverages. If the person on the other end of the counter won’t fork over the drinks without a valid driver’s license, that business passes the test. But if, as at least a couple of them did in this promo, they serve drinks without a proper ID check, the fun begins. In addition to the promo, I also obscured the identities of nearly everyone who wasn’t a uniformed police officer in the story itself; fortunately, Beth Burnett was on this story early enough that the blurring wasn’t a big problem, and I was able to get the script written fairly early.

In what’s becoming an at-least-once-a-year pheomenon, we once again spent an entire week on the topic of identity theft and how to prevent it, with four nightly stories (Tuesday through Friday) covering different facets of it, and another of our popular “free public document shredding days” on Saturday. Reporter Mike McCormick was on the case again, digging through dumpsters and coming up for air long enough to give me footage at a very early stage, allowing me to write and edit everything all at once. Graphics-wise, I conjured up a “strip of shredded paper” lower-third graphic at home in Paint Shop Pro, which I also used to create a distressed newsprint version of the station logo; these elements carried across the entire week to give everything a unified theme.

One of the first orders of business going into November sweeps was the creation of some new image promotion to replace some recently-retired spots. It had been quite a while since we promoted our sports team, and the arrival of new sports director Mark Lericos seemed like an opportune time to do so. It also helped to get Mark’s face and name in front of the audience. I recycled some elements of the sports open I had produced a few months ago, adding the three sports guys’ bluescreen shots that were originally shot for the various iterations of the news open itself.