Behind the Scenes

Or, My Last Unofficial Field Trip.
Which is what I went on this morning.
A sort of pre beginning of school trip with the Media class, the folks I was working with at school who did the morning television thingy.
I mostly went because it was an opportunity to go behind the scenes at the local tv station:

I'm not officially at that school anymore, but I had committed to go a couple of weeks back.
So anyways, off we went!
They were broadcasting the Sunrise Show at the time:

It was really cool!
We got to watch them do an interview and the news and the weather.
Which by the way surprised me as the weather person spent the whole time off camera actually researching the weather at his own computer station.
The control room where the director and producer sit:

If you squint yer eyeballs you can see that each screen has like twenty different little screens all showing different things.  The two screens on the left have the live feed and a screen that shows what's cued up next.
This station actually a combination of three stations, with two different networks.
The Sunrise Show is produced locally, the other two stations were broadcasting network stuff.
Don't ask me how that came about, but they share a common news room:

Here we are, mingling with the talent:

The sound dude sits in a separate room:

He was really nice as he found me some batteries after my camera died.
Thanks sound dude!
There was also a room where all the live and satellite feeds come in.
The wall o'electronics:

Because of the time difference, shows being broadcast now are recorded and played back later.
I don't even want to think about the kind of storage capacity they have!
Interestingly, there are still a lot of old video tapes sitting around as they haven't yet converted everything to digital:

Seriously, there were tons of Betamax tapes sitting around!

Upstairs we went to see some production stuff, you know, where they put together commercials and promo spots.

Amazing!

Anyways, the kids did great asking a lot of questions about pathways into the industry and what kind of courses they should take in college and how hard is it to become an anchor person.

I think it's awesome that they aspire to such lofty goals.

Anyways, thanks to all at Hawaii News Now for letting us take a peek behind the scenes.

I'm going to miss those kids.

Sort of.