Short version: I survived. And they even let me have a piece of paper that says so.
Somewhat longer version: I'm now the proud owner of a diploma in basic and advanced broadcasting and announcing from the Atlanta Broadcast Institute. At no point did I actually kill anyone, despite any overwhelming desire to do same, nor did I actually burst into flame and immolate, despite it being suggested that I could really use a Valium. The 60min radio show we had as a final actually went off without even the slightest hitch, which I can only lay at the feet of obsessive and hyper-aggressive pre-planning and the truly lazy geek's helper, not over-rehearsing.
There are a few pictures from the graduation, but unfortunately, power to the camera died before more than just a few basic shots could be grabbed. Despite that, somehow I managed to be in a couple of them.
Bugger.
Tomorrow, I'm headed down to Project961 with Swan and Speir to see if they'll actually accept me as an intern. ("The 35 Year Old Intern" sounds like a movie title.) Hopefully, they will and I can start memorizing the manual for the NexGen VoiceTRACing system they use to semi-automate the station.If anyone can become familiar with a complicated, interlaced, multi-node distributed audio database in under three days, it's me. Who's better qualified? Besides, the thing's built on Novel Netware 6.5. How complicated can it be, with a retro underpinning like that? Novel is migrating to SuSE Linux, itself, so I'm already positioned ahead of the curve ...
Regardless, we'll see if I get on. Could be you'll be hearing me on broadcast radio in under 6 months. Not bad for a guy going through the equivalent of a midlife crisis without the 20 year old models, right? (The sports car, I already have.)
So, yeah. Next week is finals for me, with Rolling Radio being spread over two days of frenzied nightmares and the video editing project being up as well.
That last is of interest because I finished it, already. Mind you, I did something slightly ... unexpected.
The assignment:
Take this pile of stock footage shot in Atlantic Station. Put together a video with at least a 60sec voice over and a background audio track that comes up and down as appropriate under at least one interview. For extra credit, do a stand-up intro for the piece (you may borrow one of the school's cameras to do so).
Obviously, what they expected was a sort of dynamic, upbeat commercial insert for Atlantic Station.
What they will get is pointedly not what they expected.
I fear my sense of humour is dangerously perverse.
It's far, far easier to write about things you care about. When they dropped the bomb that I'd need a 60sec commercial for my rolling radio show, I first thought I'd do a Google ad, with the repeated cry, "Ask Google!" but, having awakened with only slightly bleary eyes and only a hint of rattle in my chest, I saw a pollen count reading on TV (5,347) and thought to myself:
I'm well aware I haven't posted much of late. I just haven't had the time or energy; the most I hope for most days is a few Twitter updates.
Today was -- a day. The before-lunch class was interesting. We had Stuart Culpepper teach a voice class. Yes, that's an IMDB link. You've heard the voice before; if you've heard the national ads for QT that mention "cap-u-chino" and any of several thousand other national commercials.
Yes, he's one of those voices. I made him say "in a world ..." for me.
He was teaching our voice acting class.
Then there was lunch and Lisa Love shambled in for the latter half of the day. Of course, no one, including her, had any idea what we were doing and 1.5hr of my 2hr class day pretty much was eaten up by fiddling about with an utterly unreasonable in-class critique which finally got shaken down into something humanly comprehensible, which I then hammered hard because I didn't have to be my own board op.
I despise board ops. If anything, board ops have convinced me I simply do not want to go into radio jocking. I despise the mixing board with the raging fire of a thousand Kryptonian red suns. I can talk on the mic all day. I can do traffic and weather and sound utterly comfortable. I managed to hit the doughnut ad (an ad which has music/vocals pre-recorded with a hole in the middle for the jock to read copy into) dead on with only one brief, half-heard run-through of the underlying bit the first time, with perfect timing.
I'm good at reading things. I'm excellent at energy and clarity. I'm kind of half-suck at adlibs, of all things. And wretchedly, horrifically, Terrible [-2] at board ops.
Lately, I've been feeling the rather loosely held mask of humanity slip a bit at class as irritations and frustrations start piling up like corpses or dead-wood. I've been mostly-human so far pretty successfully; only a few odd, random comments about eating babies or the like, hardly worth mentioning. As we get down to the wire, though, I can feeling little bits of crystalline rage building up and lodging in my gullet, just waiting for the right moment to poke out through my skin and revel the depth of my distaste for the bulk of those around me at just the wrong moment.
It doesn't help that I have a 60minute rolling radio show that I'm Co-Producer, Segment Director, and Traffic / Weather for. Thank Hades the rest of my team for that little project is folk I can pretty much count on. I can only imagine the obsessive nightmare I'd be suffering were I to feel I had to cover someone else's work on. With John doing News Director, Chris on the Music Direction / Main Talent, Latoria as Board Op, and Nadia as the logging Producer, I at least know I can count on them to do their jobs.
(You'll note how cleverly I arranged to only have 4min of live air out of 60min; this is called "wisdom.")
At this point, I just don't know where things are going with this madness. I have to figure out where I want to intern, very soon, and I'm torn between Total Traffic / Metro Traffic, and going big and trying to get on at CNN / Turner as a video editor or teleprompter operator. If I go radio, there's a really good chance I'll be able to jump up to some kind of on-air talent eventually, especially given my love for big tech and the proliferation of satellite radio and HD. If I go TV, I'd be aiming to get into back-end post-production. Hell, I already have experience with Adobe After Effects, and that's on my own time.
So, yeah. Not sure where I want to go with things, which probably explains the scattered nature of this post. Heather would probably diagnose me as being in the down-phase of my latent mild personality disorder, leading to irritability and frustration. I would be hard-pressed to argue.
There's a certain pleasure in creation. I have the twisted pleasure in creating ... well, items and experiences that never actually occurred. I suppose it's the pseudo-creator in me, though I definitely don't consider myself an artist, I'm a craftsman. That's why folks look to me to be the Program Director, even if I can't run a sound board for anything. It's a tech-geek thing.
So, I created the Morning Show That Never Was.
"What's that?" I hear you asking.
The Morning Show That Never Was is ... well, just that, a fictional morning show staffed by four of us who just seem to sync up and get along well in class, constantly playing off one another's odd quirks. Staff (with links to their personal audio sliders) are:
Together they put on the WABI SSS&M Hardcore Morning Show, an eclectic mix of hardcore, underground, punk, and surrealist country music along with enough madness to force 2d20 SAN rolls during your AM drive time (show slider 1, show slider 2). The kind of thing you just can't hear on normal broadcast radio, these cultists of crooning are restricted by FCC regulation to Satellite or HD radio, and preferably to very small rooms with padded walls.
There have been rumors that the Hardcore Morning Show has been the target of violent jihad declarations, but Lord Billy Fayetteville denies these charges, saying, "What?"
When both the FCC and FDA were contacted for comments, they responded much the same way.
Why do I suddenly have the urge to stat myself up?)
Man, ABI's been keeping me busy. Not just because I'm keeping up with my homework, but because I'm obsessively pushing forward and doing things like completing the whole production of commercials and such two weeks before they're due. When we're supposed to be turning in the copy for them, I'm able to hand in polished audio-edited pieces.
I blame my obsessive nature.
It's cool. And techy. And all sorts of fun.
I'm going to try and get all the video footage that we're supposed to use for our video assignment and put it on my Portable Vault. Possibly the best tech investment I've made lately, since it's a 20gb drive the size of an iPod. And cost per gigabyte is less than half that of a smaller flash drive. Given that it's carting around all my audio, my class assignments and reviews, and an entire audio FX library (the one at school being smaller than mine, in fact), and soon my video project ... well, I need the space.
Besides, it's such a cock-size compensation thing to slap it down on the table and say, "Mine's bigger than yours."
However, that said, if you're interested in the kind of things I'm producing these days:
Taco Mac 60sec Radio Ad The first one we had assigned and the one I had the most complicated inspiration for. I couldn't find anyone else willing to voice the characters so I had to do all three myself. Not exactly what I wanted, but pretty cool.
Coke 60sec Radio Ad The one I'm rather fond of. The idea was to target a demo we're not part of, and "young yuppie parents" pretty much hit the bill. I managed to integrate children, babies, thunder (my fave thunder effect, heard in the Taco Mac ad too; Castle Thunder), rain, and Coca-Cola history in one spot. The retro feel makes me think of the stuff in the World of Coca-Cola.
Coke 30sec Radio Ad Take the above ad, then cut it out in the middle and tighten it up just a hair. I think it works just as well and can play in a few more rotations, which pleases me to no end. Not really required by the assignment, I'm just obsessive.
Traffic Today's assignment was just to write a traffic report. Me? I needed to write it them read it in my local mic, just to test it for length. It comes out to 58sec, which is easily tweakable to an exact 60sec. I feel all accomplished.
I'm feeling pretty accomplished overall. Things keep going well, and I'll feel secure going into production work, at least.
OK, maybe not so much. Please, by all that's unholy, ignore the horrible tentacled thing on the right side of the pic.
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong.
On the up-side, I discovered one of the coolest things ever:
All of the cameras in WSB's studios are roboticly tele-operated, with pre-programed shot positions with occasional remote override and management.
Ie, not only could I be a camera operator, but I could be a damn fine one. I've even had course-work in industrial robotics left over from college. (Not that much difference between the heavy-duty robotic arms they used for car manufacture at Hapeville and an electric camera-rig ultimately.)
That's strangely, even absurdly reassuring. Actual full-bore production work isn't really out of my reach. I can edit video like nobody's business, and I checked -- they use Avid Liquid Pro on the systems all over the studio. It's no longer a question of having to go into radio because I just couldn't physically do the things involved with working my way up in TV production, it's a real choice.
And I like that.
Other odd facts:
The backdrop of daytime Atlanta behind the anchors is a real projected, HD image from a camera on the roof.
There are five different radio stations in the bowels of the WSB building, all on the same wall.
There's a bluescreen for doing weather in the news studio -- but the bulk of the displays are real plasma displays. Only the big full-screen map shots are bluescreen.
There are only five people in the on-floor studio during the whole shoot of the 6p Sunday evening news.
Anchors are perversely irreverent during commercial breaks.
On Sundays, they do their own make-up.
They keep the central control booth about as dark as I like my bedroom.
A disturbingly good time, all told, even when Tom Regan got us lost in the bowels of the building.
I suppose I should say something about class this past week, if I were sane.
Well, if I were.
To sum up a week's experience in the brief: It's been freakin' great.
Alright, perhaps not that great, but I definitely feel like I'm in something I can actually accomplish, which I'll cop to being mildly concerned about in the run-up. I've been focused and on top of things to the point where other folks in the class are asking me questions with the full expectation that I'll have answers, and I usually do, which is magnificent for an already bloated ego. They even ask me to hang about before/after class and help them get their board ops down and frankly I hate that bloody thing.
Probably less than I'll hate the camera next week as I have camera ops starting Tuesday. I'm thinking this place probably doesn't have a robotic suspension crane and the interface to a tracking system -- which perversely or not, I'd actually have some experience working, as they have a lot in common with the robotic armature systems I tinkered with in college Industrial Robotics.
Not exactly like the one I was running, as it only had eight channels, but still ...
Well, I survived the first day at ABI, with only a mild case of personal humiliation. Arguably, I shouldn't really be embarrassed by the fact I have tentacles and they're not really adept at manipulating things like radio mixing boards, but even after thirty-plus years, I'm discomfited by ten people watching with rapt interest while I fumble with a piece of bloody paper until someone takes pity and races in to put it in the clip. We won't even discuss me jacking my headset into the console ... forgetting entirely I can't put it on myself.
My ego took a little more pounding today than maybe it ought. What can I say, this is about as close to a whiny emo-boy post as you'll ever see from me. Enjoy it.
On the other hand, tomorrow promises to be slightly better. The syllabus says we'll be having our first Voice class, which ought to be terribly useful to me since today my primary critique was that I didn't sound very "warm" when trying to sell young mothers on getting their hatchlings immunized against measles. It was all I could do to keep from sounding positively gleeful while discussing encephalitis and hearing loss for the little blighters, so I consider it a net win, really.
Ooooh, pretty. And rugged like a huge heavy thing should be.
I also get to tinker around with the Short/cut systems that they have, apparently, which doesn't hurt my feelings at all. Alright, it's a hardcore dual-track editing system that seems to be really popular among the folks who don't trust them newfangled computers to do decent editing, but ... I suppose I can accept that.
And, finally, from now to the end of training, we have a daily assignment to find an article or event and be able to discuss it. Tuesdays are for Arts / Entertainment stories. After all, DJ's and the like need something to talk about to fill time on the odd occasion.
ART AND KINK COLLIDE IN 'DIRTY SOUTH' VALENTINES' DAY EROTIC MOVIES
Whether you're an art-lover, or an erotic adventurer, you won't want to miss Valentine's Day with the PinkEye program "Dirty South", featuring a program of Southern-made queerotica. We're especially excited to host Atlanta filmmaker/photographer Teri Rice's 15-year anniversary showing of her ground-breaking film 'The Kindling Point," shot here in Atlanta!
This showing will be the never-before seen director's cut of the movie that earned Ms. Rice international acclaim. 'The Kindling Point' (1993) frames intimate rituals of lesbian sexuality in the context of artful dominance and submission.
Well, so, yeah. I guess I technically qualify as a "student" again, having paid my tuition. I just need to decide whether I want to take day or night classes, get through them, then do my internship. And then, find / steal / create a job.
It's ... weird. ABI has an Avid editing suite, which I've been dying to get my twisted tentacles on for years. Kind of frightening. By the time I'm done, I'll have a dense overview of pretty much every facet of audio / visual production. There's a lot of fun in that, and a lot of hyperdense data to accumulate in my brainmeats.
I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with some instruction. Which involves admitting I'm not fully aware of all data in the universe, so it's a hard admission.
Short version: I survived. And they even let me have a piece of paper that says so.![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/goth_boy/determined.gif){kind=small}
determined![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/goth_boy/artistic.gif){kind=small}
creative
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chipper
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grumpy
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thoughtful
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