What Behind the Scenes Looks Like

So for the last couple of weeks, there's been a large amount of people at the station who've been working real hard to try and put this Homecoming show together. This morning, finishing off the show was a culmination of hard work but also the beginning of the Homecoming festivities in the city as Columbia gets ready for Saturday. The show was led by KOMU Reporter David Earl and Executive Producer Rod Petersen. They were in charge of setting up the different people to come into the station and make sure we had extra staff to coordinate all our different shots. For those of you who don't know a lot about broadcast, that takes a lot of work.



I usually have a role in the Friday morning show, but usually it isn't as big as the one I had today. The funny thing is, my role wasn't even that big this morning. On Friday mornings I web edit, but for this show, David wanted me do a behind the scenes look at how we did it. So I shot a lot of video on Friday morning before our show. We put a wireless mic on a couple of the different reporters who were working the show. That way, we could get sound from them candidly. That's what happened, and we were able to catch a lot of the reporters 'in the moment,' where it wasn't a formal interview, and I was really pleased with how the story turned out.

The favorite shots of my piece were when I took the camera outside the newsroom and into our live truck shed. I stuck a mic on one of our producers Samantha Kubota as she climbed a ladder. Needless to say, it was pretty funny because she couldn't find what she was looking for and thought that everybody was trying to pull a prank on her. She ended up saying, "I think I just stepped in bird poop," on camera. Do you think I used it in my piece? Of course I did. How could you not? That is TV at its finest!

Seth at his finest behind the scenes!

If you watched the morning show, you realized just how small of a part that piece was. If you think about it, our show is two and a half hours long. My story ran twice and total, it took up just more than three minutes. There was so much fresh content in our show, so many different Homecoming stories. Without everyone there, it wouldn't have been possible. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if we had to take out content in our shows simply because it's very easy to spend more time than planned on stories. There's a lot ad libbing when you have a show with no teleprompter! The more conversational shows like this are, the better they turn out.

Reporter Blake Hanson live and local as always.

 
All in all, I think the show was a pretty big success. Somebody came up to me later on in the day and said, "Good morning show." I told him thanks, but you should've been behind the scenes. It was pretty chaotic. The most important part is whether it looked good on air or not. In the end, that's all that matters. The effort that people like Earl and Petersen put in had to be an incredibly big amount, and if they hadn't set up all the things that they did, a complicated show like this could have turned out disastrous.

     

To see a behind the scenes look, watch the video above.