Just For TV Teachers

Hey, it’s my blog, so this time, it’s all about me. Or at least about stuff I want to promote. So read on, and feel free to send comments with your own shameless plugs.

Shameless Plug #1

See the www.htvmagazine.com website for our conversation with Jerry Jacob, KY3 anchor/reporter who is leaving the anchor desk behind to enlist in the military at the age of 41. Jerry is “good people” and we will miss him.

Shameless Plug #2

See the same HTV website in late January for a brand new online broadcast, “Random Play,” which seeks to make viewers laugh. “Seeks” is the key word. The show will run 15 minutes, and it will feature high school humor. Guess we should run a warning for those over 18 or 19.

Shameless Plug #3

Join STN. If you teach broadcasting or video production, you should sign your high school or middle school up and start taking part in STN activities. It’s the only national organization designed by and for scholastic broadcasters and advisers, and guess what? STN contests come with critiques by professionals, unlike other national competitions we will Not Specifically Publish At this time. Okay, that was a little mean, but it felt soooooo good.

Shameless Plug #4

Buy our HTV DVDs if you want. See some of our student-produced segments from days gone by, and support our annual HTV Alumni Scholarship Fund. You will feel good about yourself, and we will feel good about the fund growing. Go to htvmagazine.com, then click on the “Store” link at the top. You can even watch a 30-second clip designed to entice you into spending your money.

Shameless Plug #5

Watch “Friday Night Lights.” I didn’t until last week, when I caught up by viewing all ten episodes free on the NBC website. The show is very good. I do not follow football much, but this show is about a lot more than football. Teachers and students can all relate to scenarios played out on this program. Some are painful to watch, but they ring true. Kudos to the writers, producers and actors.

Whew! Glad to get that out of my system. Hope you enjoyed it, and we’ll see you right back here in a few days with more uh, well, bloggery.

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(begin drum roll)

“And now, the Top Ten Lessons Learned in 2006 by this TV teacher….”

10. Once you try three times to cover a topic, and fail all three times, well, give up. “Friends With Benefits,” you win. You may be common among some teens, maybe even lots of teens, but nobody here can prove it.

9. One in two former students will need to borrow a camera to tape a wedding within six months of graduating. Usually, it’s not their wedding.

8. There is a direct correlation between high ACT scores and the inability to utilize a simple tripod.

7. The best way to communicate complex thoughts and concepts with a teenager is by text message. Direct conversation is so 2004.

6. The latest sign of the Apocalypse was heard in my Broadcast I class last week: “I so wish I could have lived in the ’80s.” I did, kid, and it wasn’t that great. Pull up your leg-warmers and like, hush.

5. The Cardinals shocked the world and won the series. It was a great reminder: Don’t give up on your team.

4. Finding good stories is a teachable skill, I think. Some kids never get it, but others find out there are stories all around them.

3. Nothing can pick you up like a visit from a former student, one who reminds you how much he enjoyed your class and appreciated the experience.

2. Saying goodbye to a great supporter is difficult. We will miss KY3’s Jerry Jacob. He taught us so much through the years with his stories and his words of wisdom.

1. The spouse who lets you work five 12-hour days in a row without complaint is worth holding onto. See you in 2007, Marth. I promise we won’t be working any Saturdays. For a while. Seriously.

(end drum roll)

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The clip show. Ah, what fun.

We do a “year-in-review” program most Decembers, and we’ll do one next week if all goes well. First we have to polish off our latest new show, but other than shooting anchor intros, the review show really is a snap. It’s also an interesting exercise for the teacher, to cull through the last 12 months of stories and help the kids choose maybe 10 that provide a pretty good representation of 2006. For us, this program is not meant to be the “best of HTV,” but rather, a snapshot of the topics that caught our attention.

One of these days before I retire, I intend to put together a DVD of maybe 20 stories that I would want people in the year 2050 to see, to give them a true picture of what HTV Magazine was all about. Of course, I fully expect DVD technology to be a relic in 2050. By then, who knows how video will be delivered to the consumer? I suppose our flying cars will come with 3D projectors as standard equipment. Wait, weren’t they predicting flying cars 40 years ago?

It’s a daunting idea, selecting 20 stories to represent a career. By the time I retire, I will have been the HTV adviser for over 20 years. I might even go 25. So let’s say I decide to pick one story from each year. That would make it a little easier, right? Well, what do you do when you have three or four stories from one very successful year that are better and more significant to your program then stories produced in certain less-productive years? Shouldn’t you still represent each year?

Then there is the segment that means more to you because of the “back story” than maybe stronger pieces from that same year. Ug. Do you go with your heart, or with your mind? In my mind, I can choose stories that earned national honors, or were technically superior. If I do that, how do I leave out the one that touched my heart more, and took on a more important topic, than maybe the one that got the biggest honors?

What am I getting myself into? Mmm. Maybe I’ll just put together a DVD called “Teacher’s Choice” and put whatever I want on it, based on my personal preference. Not a “best of” or a “most-honored” disc at all. Just a trip down memory lane for me, a reminder of the decades of good times, hard work, late hours, cold pizza, and priceless teaching moments shared with students I will never forget.

It’s something all of us should do, really. Hang onto every show, keep stories archived, and when it’s time to ride into sunset, take along your own “home movies” of a career well-spent.

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On our staff, we work in pairs, reporter and photographer, to produce stories for “HTV Magazine.” It’s a newsmagazine that airs about every four weeks. Because we take that long to find, shoot and edit stories about teen issues and events, I tell the staff they have time to go the extra mile. They do not have to crunch deadline daily or weekly, like students at many schools do. So I expect more, and so does their audience. One way we often find “more” is by having our production teams face “the firing line” before they start shooting. It’s a great way for the entire team to have input on every story.

Here’s how it works. When class begins, the partners sit together. I sit in the back of the room, and two stools are placed at the front. Each pair takes turns going to the front of the class, and we begin with me asking, “What’s your focus statement?” Sometimes the answer is sufficient, but often I have to help them tweak their focus a bit. It’s one of the best ways to keep them on-target, and even very experienced students need help with that, I find. After their focus statement is settled, the entire class takes over.

I encourage students to ask the reporter and photog sitting on “the firing line” to ask specific questions. “Who will you be interviewing?” “Why aren’t you talking to the counselor?” “Can you get behind the scenes to show us how they do that?” “Do you think you can get enough b-roll?” Not all of the feedback comes in question form. Plenty of suggestions are made. “Show the guy who cleans up later.” “Do a stand-up in front of the stadium.” “Get a good sequence when the race begins.”

It’s a free-flowing, supportive, creative process. The firing line is used to put the class in the role of the viewers who will watch the show. It also gives the reporter and photographer a good indication of the challenges they will face in producing their story. In fact, I have had several groups through the years change their story entirely due to this process. I’ve also seen some teams run to a computer, get online, and do some instant research before they come to the front of the class unprepared for the questions that will come.

Done properly, this form of (ug, an educational phrase is cometh) cooperative learning (I receive no kick-back from Kagen, I promise) can reveal challenges the producers never considered. Since it is done early in the process, preferably a couple of days after the stories are posted on the Assignment Board, there is plenty of time for teams to make changes in their approach, or scrap it all and start from scratch.

The firing line is simple to execute, encourages teamwork, makes everyone think like a viewer, and leads students to make their own decisions about the approach they will take in covering their stories.

As a teacher, I get to sit at the back of the room, where I am most comfortable, drink some coffee, remind them to talk one at a time, and watch it all unfold.

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I have seen a lot of high school shows and student-produced stories during the 18 years I’ve been teaching broadcast journalism at Hillcrest High School. Things have really changed since the VHS days, when we edited from deck to deck, and the cameras were big enough to mount on your shoulder. Now we have smaller, lighter cameras and editing is all about putting everything on a hard drive and manipulating it any way you want.

One thing has not changed, and it’s this: A good story, told well, with interesting characters, with a beginning, middle and end, still outshines a segment full of special effects, music, graphics, and all the digital juice kids can put into it.

Now on our htvmagazine.com website you can watch an example of a pretty basic, straightforward news feature produced in 1999 by three of my students. I consider it one of the six or seven best pieces we’ve ever done for HTV. It’s about teenagers going through basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood in mid-Missouri. The team of three, and I am happy to share their names, Elizabeth Ragain, Jesse Nivens, and Julie Greene, spent a day and a night at the fort to get a sense of what it meant for teenagers to go from civilian life to doing things the “army way.”

The visuals, which may not be as powerful when viewed on the web as they were on television, were thorough and put the drill sergeants right in your face. You saw, heard and felt basic training, up close and intense, there in your living room.

The story came two years before the attack on America in the fall of 2001. It showed why the military life was a good fit for some young people looking for direction. It also pointed out that it might not be the right choice for everyone. I wonder if anything about basic training has changed since then. I kind of doubt it. It might even be tougher since there is a specific conflict troops are being prepared for now.

The kids shot their raw footage on two Panasonic 456 camcorders, with the black and white viewfinders, and edited on an analog system that allowed for very few effects. It was linear editing, so they had to have a plan before they started. You actually logged your tapes on paper back then, instead of just capturing everything on the hard drive, then sorting through it by constant trial and error like so many do now.

It’s an example of good storytelling with memorable characters, like the drill sergeant, who looks like he came right out of central casting. The natural sound of chants, orders being barked out, gunfire, and recruits “getting smoked,” to quote the sergeant, added texture to the piece. No “Soundtrack Pro” was needed for that.

Maybe I am waxing nostalgic about simpler times. Actually, editing now is so simple that everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. It’s so much more than dragging and dropping clips on a timeline, and adding effects, often to cover shortcomings in your video.

Focusing on good storytelling at the high school level is critical, I believe. We help our kids the most when we demand that they have a simple focus statement, they work at finding strong characters, and they remember to have a beginning, middle and end to their stories. Simple to say, so difficult to do.

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