Today was my second and last day with the folks from FOX50. I started the say trying to find my way to Kevin Kolbe’s office through the maze that is the FOX50/WRAL office. Luckily I found my way pretty quickly. This morning I spoke with Gayle more in-depth. She works with graphics mostly, but she used to do animation as well. We talked a lot about how art and composure is really important not just in graphic but in promos and ads as well. She works with the other people in the department to make sure everything looks goo color and composure wise. She reinforced the fact that the people she works with are all people who would never be able to work on an assembly line. They would be bored to tears and frustrated because they weren’t able to be creative. Not only would they be very slow, but nothing that came off the assembly line would work, probably because they were trying to see what would happen if they changed the way something was done. I also had a long chat with her about fonts and how to choose a font for every situation.

After I spoke with Gayle, I was able to accompany Glenn, who I met yesterday, out on a shoot. We drove out to Catering Works, who incidentally catered the Charger Derby at CA, so that Glenn could get shots of their food. We started out by interviewing the florist who works there. Then, we moved into the kitchen to get some shots of the people cooking the food. After that we went and actually got shots of the food. Watching Glenn work was mesmerizing. He would go from one shot to the next without thinking about it, just shooting what ever he could at the time. he was doing all this while he was giving me tips about shooting and explaining what sorts of shots he was getting. He was explaining how he goes about setting up a shot, how to keep the shots interesting, making sure that there wasn’t too much space, and more. Then we got to eat the food! And man was it good. Sadly because Glenn and I were the last ones to sit there were no chairs left at the main table so we got to sit at a different table in the corner. It gave me time to ask him more questions which was nice. After the lovely food was all gone we interviewed one of the women who runs the company. She was very nice, and Glenn made her feel very comfortable despite having a camera in her face. He is very good at what he does. Sadly I can’t remember her name, but she was the one who developed the program that they use to pretty much run their company. She doesn’t even have a background in programming. I was very impressed. After that interview was over it was back to the FOX50/WRAL studio.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with Marc. His official title is the Senior Promotional Producer, or that’s what he told me. He is the one who edits promos and other project that the group works on. He walked me though the process of creating one of their summer promotional videos. First outline what you want to include or see in the promo. Next create a rough script that lays out the promo. Then, finalize the script and story board the promo so that it goes from words to a visual layout. After that, create all the necessary graphic and other elements that go into the promo. Finally, Put everything to gether and make sure it looks good. Marc also gave me a lot of awesome resources that I can use for my own work. When it was about time for me to leave today, he asked if I wanted to go see the server room up in engineering. I said yes and we went on an adventure through the maze to find our way there. We found the room, but it turned out that Marc didn’t even have access to the room. Nonetheless it was still cool seeing the server room through the windows. It looks the same as it does in the movies. Finally it was time for  me to leave, and as I was leaving Marc said “Remember, free things and keyboard shortcuts”. Don’t worry Marc, I have all the sites written down. No way am I passing up free stuff.

-CJ

Today I visited the FOX 50/WRAL studios in downtown Raleigh. There I met Kevin Kolbe who showed me around the studios a bit. First Stop was the master control room. All of the channels run by this station are controlled by the people in these rooms. These are the people who change between the program and the commercials, as well as make sure everything is working properly.  After the brief tour of some the other facilities such as the small and large scale studios, Kevin took me to a meeting where he and his co-workers meet every Monday. There I met Sierra, Pete, Gayle, and Mark. I listened to a fascinating presentation about color and psychology. I spent the rest of the morning with Sierra seeing how she edits the website and how she goes about adding new pages and promoting the shows on the site, funny enough they use WordPress for their website. She also went over how she runs the FOX50 facebook page. I then worked with Pete for a while after lunch. He handles the some of the promo editing. He showed me how they go about doing their editing, at least for the Steve Harvey Show Promos. I also got an early look at the new season of So You Think You Can Dance: Next Generation. To finish off the day I met David Crabtree, an anchor for WRAL. He introduced me to a whole bunch of people in the News Room, from other anchors to editors and others in production.

Over all it was an amazing day, and I really look forward to going back tomorrow!

-CJ