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

During the spring of 1997, Fox 46 also struck a deal to carry University of Arkansas men’s basketball games - as opposed to KFDF’s earlier package of women’s games. The image campaign announcing this acquisition was very flashy, filled with rapid-fire edits that occasionally got down to only two frames per clip. Not a bad trick when you’re editing on 3/4″ tape without any non-linear equipment.

This beauty was a station ID for Fox 46 which run during the 1996 Halloween season. It featured a Lightwave animation of a jack-o-lantern sitting in a puddle of blood, illuminated only by candlelight, while I ranted on in the most sinister voice I could muster (which was actually pretty sinister). Somewhere, a child is probably still having nightmares because of me…

For one set of 1996 generic programming line-up promos, I tried out a vaguely Windows-inspired look, calling up a clip from each show in the line-up via a menu. It didn’t wind up looking anything like Windows, but everyone seemed to like it. This was a precursor to the much more involved mock-Windows image campaign I launched just before leaving UPN 32 in Green Bay.

In September 1996, KPBI launched a live morning public affairs show called 46 Good Day. It was chaotic at times - we were barely staffed to stay on the air, let alone run a live morning show. But somehow we pulled it off. I produced opens, bumpers, an elaborate set of end credits, weekly recap (a.k.a. proof-of-performance) spots, and generic image promos.

The “We Hog Fans” campaign for The Huddle was replaced by a cute little potbellied piglet brought to the studio by one of our salesmen. (Don’t even ask.) The pig refused to do anything but fall asleep in a patch of sunlight by my desk - so I got footage of that and did a promo in which the little pig dreams of becoming an Arkansas Razorback “so they’ll talk about me on The Huddle.” It was way too cute for any respectable sports call-in show - and somehow, like those seemingly out-of-place ESPN promos, it stuck.

The Huddle could only survive on a rehash of its original launch promo so long, so I rounded up show hosts John Wilhelm and Marty Houston to shoot an amusing little piece from a script I had hastily written. It went a little something like this:

Marty: John, it’s hot in here! Would you quit hogging the fans?

John: Why, sure, Marty!

John turns a large number of desk fans and oscillating fans toward Marty, who is suddenly blown back across the room, landing in a pile of blowing papers.

Marty: That wasn’t very nice, John!

The promo ended with the tag “We Hog Fans,” which has a double meaning for fans of the Arkansas Razorbacks (a.k.a. the Hogs).

An F-3 tornado slammed into downtown Fort Smith, including the KPBI/KFDF studios, on April 21, 1996. A lot of that year was spent recuperating from the considerable damage (one of the production/promotion department’s two Video Toasters was a total loss) and adding new capabilities, such as the FoxAlert weather warning system. Though it was billed as “the last word on the first word in weather,” we were more often plagued by the downtown area’s tendency to lose electrical power during even small thunderstorms (thanks to the electric company’s slapdash repair job to the nearest substation).

The Huddle, KFDF’s flagship local show, turned out to be such a success that management decided to move the show over to Fox 46 and expand it to a full hour. The KPBI launch campaign for The Huddle was virtually identical to the original spot that launched the show on KFDF, though the new version was a little bit slicker. There was also a little bit of an in-joke on my part, just to see if viewers were watching - for about 20 frames (two thirds of a second), the dictionary definition of “huddle” was shown between show clips. A few people did actually catch it.

Another example of my “unofficial” early production work at Fox 46/15 was a simple graphic, used for legal IDs on Christmas Eve ‘95, tracking Santa Claus across an old satellite weather map. It’s amazing what sheer boredom, and a lot of free time on one’s hands, can do for a career.

Our live annual coverage of the 1995 Fort Smith Christmas Parade was a big deal, but virtually no time was allocated to creating an open for the program. It was assumed that we’d use video from the 1994 parade…until that video turned up missing. In a big hurry - literally the evening before the parade - I devised a Lightwave animation which, owing to the enormous number of on-screen objects (namely snowflakes), took seventeen hours to render. The thing was put together on tape about thirty minutes before air. It looked much more polished and professional than anyone expected it to, given the time frame involved.

I was always of the opinion that a children’s programming block needed to have some appropriately wacky IDs and interstitial material. Early on, I had literally been a part of such a project, going on-camera (for the last time ever, please, God) as “Explorer Earl,” imploring kids (and their parents) to adopt this week’s pet from the Fort Smith Humane Society. Though I dreaded being an on-camera personality, this gig did have its perks - I got my two best friends in the world for free from the Humane Society (one of whom later made several Halloween 1996 appearances as the Fox 46 Black Cat). But having done my time as Explorer Earl, I decided to concentrate on giving our kids’ block some real personality…and some very strange IDs. In one, shown above, we zoom out (in Lightwave 4.0, naturally) on a bust of Beethoven, as the opening chords of the Fifth Symphony are heard. Within seconds, a large cow drops out of the sky with a plaintive “moo,” squashing the statue and then laying there on its side. This was just one example of several surreal pieces which (hopefully) made viewers laugh in between cartoons. It would be summer 1997 before I wound up someplace where creating a distinctive brand for kids’ programming was a big priority.

One of my first official production projects at Fox 46 was a fairly extensive graphics package for a 1995 Dallas Cowboys Training Camp special, hosted by Marty Houston and Mike Burgess. There were several “interstitial” pieces to lead into and out of commercial breaks, and about a dozen or so trivia factoid items, including a lengthy scroll of the entire season schedule. Being new and enthusiastic, I did several versions of everything, and got most of the interstitial material done in one, long night - and this was while I was working a board shift at the same time.

In early ‘95, KPBI launched a nightly five-minute weather forecast with Mike Burgess, and I got to be Mike’s producer for much of his one-year reign before he bailed out for a similar gig at NBC 24/51. The year Mike anchored our news-less weather segment was like a golden time at Fox 46, and our working relationship was an example of that - Mike and I spent many a sleepless night at the station in the springtime, with him in the studio and me in the control room. The two screens you see here also show the on-screen warning system I devised with the combination of a digital video effects box and an outdated Video Toaster, which while it was not longer useful in production could still put text on a screen. The names of our viewing area’s counties were in grey along the left side of the screen, unless the warning/watch currently being displayed applied to the county in question, in which case that county would be highlighted. And since we used a DVE instead of a bug, our system didn’t obscure any of the picture, a big plus with viewers. This was in the day and age before the modern marvels of TV weather gear which dominate newscasts (and promo time) these days, and it was before the day when every other station in a given market had its own doppler. The shots above were taken in the wee hours of April 15, 1995, when a violent storm system rolled through - and we managed to kick ass despite our low-tech approach (the Toaster-driven on-screen warning system required full-time manual control). At one point, lucky viewers everywhere got to hear me lean in the studio door and whisper “Tornado warning, Adair County!” as loud as I could without just speaking up normally - this was a station that didn’t have an IFB anywhere in the building. It may seem odd to brag about having to do things that way, but we all pulled together and made it work.

In addition to our usual legal ID full-screen graphics, a couple of holiday-themed ones were added to the rotation late in 1994.

Probably the first area where I made my presence felt on Fox 46/15 was with the creation of several “legal ID” graphics on our weather graphics system. I quickly learned the ins and outs of creating graphics in TARGA Tips+ and began throwing tons of stuff together, just to see if any of it stuck. As it turns out, for better or worse, most of it wound up on the air because the station simply hadn’t had any graphics of that quality to put on a screen before. Here is a sampling of some of those early IDs.