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

For spring 1997, another new Star Trek: Voyager image campaign was launched, this time consisting of a single, 30-second long Lightwave animation which followed a Starfleet ship past a galaxy, a planet, a sun, and into a densely-packed asteroid field, accompanied by the Voyager theme music and text telling viewers that “If you thought you couldn’t find Voyager, maybe you need to look in the right place” (that place, naturally, being UPN 32 roundabout Wednesday night). This was my final Star Trek campaign for KFDF, and my last major campaign for the station as well.

The original Voyager launch campaign had served us well, won us our first award…and, after the better part of a busy year in which I had no time to replace or significantly update it, it had outstayed its welcome as well. With a year of 3-D animation experience under my belt, I decided to do away with using footage from the show, opting to create my own Star Trek scenes instead, using Lightwave models of various ships from the series. None of those ships, however, was Voyager itself. Out of necessity and desperation, the promo became about a galaxy-wide search for Voyager - and it told viewers where they could find it at its new time on UPN 32. The Lightwave animations were some of the most elaborate and best-executed 3-D scenes I had done, and were accompanied and composited by graphics created in Targa TIPS+. The fans loved this one - aside from one who hade taped the promo, gone through it frame-by-frame, and called up to complain that my quickly-made graphic accompanying a searching Klingon ship was incorrect in giving the name of the ship - in tiny, almost unreadable print - as the “K’boom.”

Ladybacks Basketball was enough of a success to merit a handful of live Westark baseball games in the spring of 1996. It was also a foregone conclusion that I’d be doing a really cool open for it, and that it would blow the top off of the old basketball open. Given that the basketball open had won an Addy, this time there was quite a bit of pressure and scrutiny from inside the building. (By comparison, my work on the basketball animation the previous fall had been greeted with confusion - what exactly was I doing?) The baseball open timed out at nearly two minutes, but much of that total time included a huge audio pad/video background at the front for a pre-game warm-up (complete with clips of previous games - or so I intended), and a lengthy sponsor pad at the end. It never wound up running quite that way on the air. In the middle, however, was another chunk of fun animation: a baseball is hit out of the park, soars into the air past a floating logo. The camera angle swoops up over the logo, down through the letter O in “Sports,” zooms right down onto home plate, and makes a mad dash around the bases until the Westark Lions Baseball logo explodes out of the ground.

UPN 32 is on the UP ‘N’ UP. At least that was the idea behind this summer image campaign, which served us well into the early fall. The graphics were fairly simple, but the charm of the campaign was in the rapid-fire editing to the hip-hop beat of the music bed, incorporating footage from just about every show the station carried. I submitted this idea to UPN’s affiliate promo workshop and didn’t get much of a response! The music bed and editing style also carried over to a new series of legal IDs and promo tags, creating an overall branding which stayed with the station for quite a while.

Easily the longest-lasting legacy of KFDF was its in-house live sports talk show. Marty Houston and John Wilhelm hosted a half-hour (later expanded to an hour when the show migrated to Fox 46) of viewer call-ins, sports headlines, and wall-to-wall color commentary. Marty once commented - on the air! - that The Huddle had the production values of a cable access show, and that was a big part of its charm. The Huddle was launched with a bizarre promo which spoofed the then-inescapable glut of Sega commercials, comparing “our sports” (footage from The Huddle) with “their sports” (a variety of sports games played on my trusty old Odyssey2 video game system). The Sega homage continued right through the final second of the promo, in which a strange-looking stuffed animal rises into the frame and yells “HUDDLE!” (a la the then-ubiquitous “SEGA!” tagline). The Huddle promos and the show open featured 3-D work rendered in Lightwave 4.0, and the end product was composited with the Video Toaster 4000.

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.

One of KFDF’s biggest uphill battles was the long process of convincing cable systems around the area to carry us. To aid this, the “Free TV!” campaign was devised by management, pointing out to viewers that not only was KFDF’s signal free to them, but it would be provided free to cable operators as well. The intent here was to get viewers to call their cable companies to ask, “Why aren’t you carrying UPN 32?” The Free TV campaign spoofed 1940s and 1950s newsreels, complete with the Video Toaster’s ever-useful film flicker filter and even a slight “jump” to the video - an unintentional effect provided by a faulty 3/4″ VTR! The “newspaper pages” that flipped by in the newsreel were generated in Targa TIPS+.

Fort Smith/Van Buren district Addy Silver Award Winner, Self-Promotion Campaign category, 1996

KFDF’s UPN affiliation didn’t come without one hell of a fight. The local ABC affiliate, KHBS, carried the first season of Star Trek: Voyager as a secondary affiliate, but didn’t carry any of the other UPN programs. But despite Paramount’s syndication contract with KHBS, UPN automatically favored a full affiliate - even a low-power station with virtually no cable carriage - over a secondary affiliation, since their full programming slate (and thus all of their national advertising) would be seen in prime time, instead of a single show on Saturday nights at 10:35. KHBS put up an immense fight, and one of the objects of that fight was KFDF’s promo campaign announcing the Voyager move. The promos, which began airing on Fox 46 during NFL football, generated a huge amount of buzz, and both stations were getting lots of calls about this move. KHBS at one point complained to Paramount that KFDF had aired a promo containing footage to which it had no contractual rights at that point…and KHBS may have technically been correct on that point, but UPN backed up KFDF’s right to air the promos. Voyager was ours.

The “computer display” artwork in the promos was created in Targa TIPS+, and Voyager footage was composited into the final product with the Video Toaster 4000. The KFDF Voyager launch campaign also won an Addy Silver in the Fort Smith/Van Buren district in the Self Promotion Campaign category - though at one point it was nearly disqualified because the judges didn’t believe it was a locally-produced campaign. I remember finding this very irritating at the time, but with hindsight, I now realize it was a huge compliment.

It’s not every day that a wet-behind-the-ears, 23-year-old promo producer gets to create the entire image branding campaign for a whole new station. UPN 32 in Fort Smith didn’t even start out as a UPN affiliate, though it was always intended to be one at some point. UPN 32 started out as “Sports 32,” and in lieu of network programming of any kind, as many local, regional and national syndicated sporting events as possible were crammed into the schedule. Not even half a year passed before “Sports 32″ became UPN 32, and right from the beginning I was stockpiling graphic elements for such an eventuality. Indeed, the original KFDF logo, a multi-colored hexagon, was intended to play well alongside UPN’s geometric logo. The original logo was created in the Targa TIPS+ paint program, while the first UPN 32 legal IDs incorporated animated elements from Lightwave 4.0, composited with the Video Toaster 4000.

Sometimes it seemed as though management couldn’t decide which logo they liked. Having completed a year on the air with the original, home-made hexagon logo, an update was requested, and the initial result was a slightly different hexagon - essentially an updating of the original, rendered in Lightwave 4.0 on the Toaster with a metallic texture to match UPN’s new metallic version of their own logo. That logo survived through fall 1996, at which point it was superceded by a logo outsourced from a local ad agency. At various times, all three logos could still be seen on the air inside of the same commercial break due to the tremendous time pressure on rolling out new promos vs. updating the existing ones - not a very smooth rollout. (And I hate to sound like I’m a bunch of sour grapes, but the agency-produced logo even put the UPN shapes in the wrong order.)