Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer

Two of my last topicals for 40/29, done on my last day; there was little or no footage for the “New Year’s Eve” story, so I decided to do one last big effects blow-out, just for the heck of it. (I promise never to do such a spot at 40/29 again.) The other topical was a case where I had good sound and decent video in advance, and decided to break away from the usual music and editing style we use on topicals. My last topical at 40/29 (not seen here) involved the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Though the promo for this sweeps story barely ran, this is a fun little piece about a different kind of full-contact sport. There wasn’t a lot of footage to go on, and I was given nothing but nat sound, but it still turned out to be a pretty energetic spot. The “spin/blur” transition between shots is neat, even if the theme from Batman was playing in the back of my head everytime I saw it.

With this spot, I had a specific look in mind, namely all those high-tech medical spots that ABC produces for its own news shows like 20/20. Really, footage-wise, we were a bit poor on this one since the story was still being shot – we’ve had that breast cancer animation and those same two shots of doctors looking at mammograms for years now – though I tried to disguise that fact by dropping some animated elements in there (which were actually distributed by ABC to their affiliates for use in their initial 2003 coverage of the Iraq war). I was fairly pleased with how this one turned out.

A wrap-up of our fairly extensive coverage of the 2006 election, which covered at least a couple hundred races, this is a fairly standard POP spot except for the fact that it was rolled out before everyone even left the building. (The other stations in the market didn’t have a POP on the air until around lunchtime the next day, while ours had been running all morning; I had prepared most of the graphic and animation elements the night before.) All of our talent that was out in the field shows up, along with the two Arkansas gubernatorial candidates and quite possibly the kitchen sink.

Just like we did during the last sweeps, 40/29 is once again checking school security. This time, though, we sent one of our producers (rather than recognizable on-air personalities) into various elementary school campuses with a hidden camera, and for much of the time, he got to just stroll through these schools, and even into heavily-populated areas like the cafeteria, unchallenged. Not surprisingly, that video makes up a lot of this spot. At the time I was editing, there seemed to be some genuine confusion as to whether or not our producer’s identity would be disguised on-camera, so with that in mind, I did show his face but tried to obscure it as best I could in case a different call was made before (or even after) the spot hit the air.

Election time means election coverage promos, and that means “make it look as stately and solid as the sign in front of a bank.” That’s actually a challenge I enjoy, trying to achieve something approaching a classy look like that. And it certainly was a challenge here: the spot was given to me as an already-written-and-shot piece that I needed to finish out, but the studio talent shoot was a static shot at the Fayetteville news desk. Since the background of that set happens to be blue, I decided to see just how good the Boris FX chromakey plug-in is. (Turns out it’s not bad – take a look! The only embarrassing artifact is that this had to be completed and aired on a timetable that didn’t allow for the kind of precision surgery that it would’ve taken to eliminate the news desk in the shot; as the only non-blue element in the scene, it’s just sort of incongruously floating in space.) No doubt a few more election coverage spots are lurking just around the corner…

Earlier in 2006, Springdale, Arkansas voters checked “yes” next to a handful of bond issues to create a new baseball stadium and minor league team for the city; eventually, the Wichita Wranglers were lured from Kansas to Arkansas to be Springdale’s new team. Needless to say, baseball was a big story for much of 2006, and this was just one of those stories, sitting down with the owner of the Kansas City Royals to discuss Springdale’s possible future as a “farm team” for the big leagues.

Produced in a very tight time frame, this was a special 10pm news open for the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. The script was written by producer Robin Edie (and voiced by Craig Cannon), and I had about an hour to get everything together. (It was literally handed in at about 9:58.) I think it came out a little bit longer than anyone originally planned, but hopefully the effect was worth it.

After having used the previous open for something like three years, a new open for our Friday night football coverage was probably overdue. This is a major part of the station’s sports coverage, and a major sponsorship to boot, so it’s worth a little bit of extra effort. In what may be the ultimate expression of testosterone, there are few normal transitions in this open – but there are plenty of explosions! Click to see the video, along with a brief tutorial for fellow Avid editors out there, on how to blow stuff up real good in a digital kind of way. From a more straightforward video perspective, the football’s white stripes came out transparent; I think that was a goof in the graphics department, but I liked the stylized football. Besides, there’s an awesome montage running in the background, cut to the music bed, and the “open stripes” let you see more of it.

For our special preview show covering the first Arkansas Razorbacks football game of the season, which also happens to be a rematch with the USC Trojans (who spanked the Hogs by 70-odd points in their last meeting), I dipped into the archives a bit and basically borrowed my own spot from nearly 10 years ago – though I’ll admit that with the benefit of non-linear editing, cutting that previous spot on tape felt like an epic, heroic feat, while this one almost came across as anticlimactic. It’s a decent enough spot in its own right though.

Not even eight months after our last “how to use coupons” story borrowed from another Hearst station comes this, a “how to use coupons” story borrowed from another Hearst station! Okay, maybe I’m sounding a little cynical. This package was at least well produced and had some sound that made for a good promo. Now you can look at it and judge for yourself – “free, free, free!” The best thing I came up with for this one may be the “coupon” end tag, complete with disclaimers and expiration date (which also happened to be the day the story was due to air).

The first new weather image spot to feature new Chief Meteorologist Drew Michaels (the previous spots had been refits of promos that were originally on the air during Charles Salser’s tenure), this was designed to be a bit of a tech-y looking spot, with Drew immersed in the weather graphics. (Actually, he was originally meant to be more immersed than he really was, but the original concept probably would’ve required an extra week of post, and it was more important to just get it on the air.) I liked what I was able to do with the spot though.

Sometimes you’ve got to go just a little bit nuts. A combination of circumstances, some of which were admittedly of the “we don’t have anything better to tease” variety, left me with the subject of moms inducing labor on Monday, June 5th, 2006, so they don’t have “666 babies” (i.e. 6-6-06). Just a little silly? Yep. So why not make it as sinister as possible and have a laugh with it? OK, maybe not as sinister as possible – at the last minute I switched music beds because the whole thing was starting to look and sound too much like a trailer for The Omen. Hopefully everyone watching got the joke.

A fairly typical election coverage teaser consisting of some well-worn elements, I tried to at least make this one look shiny. Through no fault of the station’s, the coverage turned out to be rather underwhelming, mainly due to new touchscreen voting machines that seemed to fall apart across the entire viewing area, making manual recounts of the paper “receipts” for each voter necessary; in other words, very few conclusive results for the 10 o’clock news!

Hypnosis! It’s fun and all the kids are doing it. Hopefully you actually get that from this spot; this is a case where the sound isn’t the most thrilling stuff in the world, so there are gobs of visual elements thrown in to help sell it. Since hypnosis is what it’s about, I felt safe getting a little bit “trippy” on this one – perhaps too trippy? You be the judge. The Avid repeatedly crumbled under the layers and layers of effects here, so by the time it was done, I had christened this unwieldly monster the “Hypnopotamus.” It seemed fitting somehow.

To kick off sweeps, this package – concerning sheriff’s deputies and local police agencies training in preparation for a major warrant sweep – same together very quickly, so much so that the promo only ran for one day. There was an abundance of extremely cool footage and raw sound here – including the “Police! Down on the ground!” stuff – that helped this spot a lot. Cut to the music, add a few more sound effects (the raw sound of gunshots on the tape sounded like fireworks, so I had to sweeten that just a bit, though I found the sound effects that we had on hand for this to be embarrassingly bad, so I mixed them way down), and it’s a pretty cool little spot. It’s also so fast-cutting that Flash video conversion eats it for lunch, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like.

One day before the tenth anniversary of a destructive tornado that swept through downtown Fort Smith, 40/29 aired a half-hour special that not only looked back at those events, but at how things have changed since then, with, of course, the obligatory look at how our station’s weather tech is the best on the block. For the purposes of the promo, however, I tried to focus more on the historical element rather than self-promotion, because there are several issues surrounding this event – the economic impact, loss of life, and the nearly complete lack of any warning whatsoever – that are touchy subjects in this area, so I tried to handle it with some reverence.

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.