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

A series of nasty storms on March 30th rolled through the Fort Smith/Van Buren area, though in this case the National Weather Service and our own meteorologists had predicted a significant severe weather event several days ahead of time, so live crews were at the ready. This spot focuses on the usual message of how our weather gear, and the folks using it, can benefit the folks watching at home. These spots (meaning this :30 and a cut-down :15 version) had to be done within mere hours, so there are a few rough edges showing.

When you wind up with man-on-the-street sound like this, you simply cannot go wrong. This spot is built around the testimony from two of our viewers who survived an F3 tornado that struck Benton County in northwest Arkansas on March 12th, both of them talking about how they relied on 40/29 for life-saving weather warnings. (The first soundbyte is from a woman who was telling this to Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee - we simply couldn’t have arranged something like that if we’d tried.) It’s a short, sweet spot with no announcer, and I think it’s the best of our three POP spots from the March 12th tornado coverage.

Another aspect of our tornado and post-tornado coverage that was worth mentioning in a POP spot was the fact that there was just so much of it. The morning show the day after the tornadoes was expanded to two hours, and the 6pm news that day grew to one hour. As a result, for the first time that I can ever remember in one of our POP spots, literally every reporter on staff makes it into this promo. In case you’re wondering that the still photograph is near the beginning of the spot (also seen in the still shot here), that’s an actual photo of one tornado - possibly even two simultaneous tornadoes - captured and sent in to us by a viewer.

The first of a series of several POP spots promoting our wall-to-wall coverage of a tornado outbreak in our area in the late night hours of March 12th, this spot focuses on our weather staff’s experience and their cool gadgetry. This spot was produced in a huge hurry, so the announcer VO is actually a bit of reheated leftovers from a previous weather POP - I like to think of it as a timeless classic.

To celebrate the last special of yet another sweeps period, I decided to make a fiercely colorful spot. I do pretty good with tech spots, though I wound up having to invent a lot of stuff for this one, including the “Matrix”-ish elements seen in the letterbox area and elsewhere in the spot. (I really like the one that starts out as a standard-issue “falling code” effect and then starts to tear itself apart; that was generated entirely within the Avid using some simple title tool tricks, wipes and a few other effects.) Anything that wasn’t footage of the story’s interview subject was generated by me, including the close-up of the cell phone at the beginning and end of the spot (actually my phone, propped up against the Avid keyboard, shot with my miniDV camera). Probably my favorite of February 2006; sadly, the Flash video file of the spot barely does it justice - there’s probably a little too much color going on to survive compression.