You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The art of the live shot.
We live in a world where a 4 year old can tweet, text and shoot a selfie, all while peeing on himself in nursery school.
Technology is easy and ubiquitous, so it’s surprising when it fails.
It seems like the more we rely on these modern day marvels the more it regularly lets us down.
If you need a cane to walk, and your cane breaks, then it’s hard to walk.
That’s technology. It’s a cane that we take for granted till it breaks.
My computer hard drive crashed last week. I lost everything. Every piece of video. Every document written. Every email, every favorite saved, every photograph lingering on my desktop.
GONE. VANISHED. VANQUISHED. DESTROYED. EXTERPATED. BLOWN UP. SENT TO A VOIDLESS RIPPLE IN TIME.
I stared at the screen like a monkey touching the monolith.
What should I do? What can I do? How do I proceed?
I really was lost. I was not prepared to do my job. I had no contacts, no stories, no emails, no way to edit. I was a stow-a-way on Columbus’ crew heading to the edge of disaster.
By Monday, my computer was mostly restored, but new problems were blowing on the approaching storm front.
My live shot crapped out.
It’s not like I was on the other side of the world. I was on the other side of the parking lot.
The microwave signal outside the studio should be so strong, it causes testicular cancer in lab rats.
This live shot is a no brainer. It’s add water and stir.
I walk out to the parking lot around 20 minutes till air.
I see the truck 50 yards from the loading dock. The mast is down and the photographer is dialing up the signal.
Microwave technology is a line of sight technology. That’s why you often see microwave trucks with their masts 50 feet in the air. They are beaming a signal to a dish at the station or somewhere around town that grabs the signal and bounces it where it needs to go.
There’s an art to it, to be sure. You have to have the right atmospheric conditions and hope there isn’t a mountain between you and the receive dish you are trying to hit.
But in the parking lot? We could roll a studio camera onto the loading dock and I could scream at the camera.
In retrospect; that would have worked better.
The idea is a good one. I am going to drive the news vehicle into the frame, say a few words, concluding with “and then the thief took off almost running over the woman.”
The theatrical element would have been mashing the gas and pulling out of frame and the story would run.
Brilliance, right?
That moment would never come.
Tick Tock.
10 O’Clock doesn’t care what you have been doing for 8 hours. It’s coming whether you are ready or not. It’s the 1st rule of news.
At 10 minutes till 10, I realize that we may have a problem. The producer is yelling into my ear piece. “I can’t see you.”
Can’t see me? What the hell is she talking about? I’ve said good night to at least 2 co-workers.
If she wants to see me, just poke your head out the back door.
But she is right. She can’t see me in a way that will matter to an entire viewing audience in 9 minutes.
I yell to the photographer who has a phone to his ear and is now raising the mast.
“Why are you raising the mast?” I holler through the rain which is now picking up.
I look at the tower 50 feet away. The truck could be on fire, under attack from alqaida and we should still be able to send a signal to the station.
“They can’t see us,” he says with a sense of disbelief in his voice.
“I’m trying to hit the downtown receiver.”
That’s when I know we’re screwed.
We are 50 yards away from the tower and we can’t establish a link. So in the brilliance of the beautiful, panicking news mind, we are raising our mast as high as it will go and turning the dish away from the mother ship and firing a random signal 5 miles away to a dish on a building downtown, hoping to hit it, and then send it back to the mother ship.
Ain’t technology beautiful.
I feel like tossing my iphone to my buddy and facetiously saying “shoot me with this.”
What an exercise in futility.
If this were a Hallmark Card; it would show rain pouring down on our sad sack live truck under the graphic: Maximum effort! Minimum results!
Thank God my package is in. That much I was able to control.
It too was no easy feat considering my computer melted down like Mount Vesuvius 2 days ago and the editing software had to be reinstalled.
Buttons that use to make a cursor jump left, now bring up photos of Asian Porn.
Woah…
“How’d that happen? And man that girl’s limber.”
Total running time: 1:08
Tonight’s story: A victim telling me how a man stole her iphone in the parking lot of an Exxon station.
Tick Tock.
I hear the news begin. We are leading with weather. That means I’m on in about 3 minutes.
The rain is pelting the windshield. The dome light to the car is on. Lights are blaring at me in the darkness.
Raindrops are smashing the arm rest of the vehicle. It’s becoming absurd. I look around for a circus tent being erected.
Sadly, all I see is my predicament.
And through it all I can see my poor drenched buddy at the side of the truck. The mast is erect like Pee Wee Herman in a XXX theater.
“We gonna make it?” I shout.
He looks at me with an incredulous smile.
I listen to the anchors read a couple more stories. The news coaster is on the tracks. No stopping it now.
Suddenly they are reading the lead in I wrote to my story.
They are suppose to say “And he is live with more…” Instead they power through and the package rolls.
Oh oh!
I am helpless. Technology gremlins win. Tick Tock.
Everyone keeps going, keeps reading, keeps pushing the show forward.
The live shot would have been sweet. I would have driven up to the camera, spoken my lines and then driven off into the murky darkness.
Like Clint Eastwood riding into the sunset, I instead rolled into a thunder-cloud of failure.
As I hear my own voice in my own ear, I know the live shot is scrubbed. The anchors read the lead in, my story begins to air, and it’s over. Just like that!
Tick Tock.
News doesn’t care. Never has.
“Nice try,” I holler to my photographer, still trying to fine tune the signal, on the phone with master control.
“I’m going home.”
He waves. I’m sure he will have some choice words for some sleeping engineer somewhere.
Sometimes technology is amazing. Sometimes it is our slave master.
Tonight I am its bitch. It slaps me down like a baby pimp on a mean street.
Technology is my momma on this night and for no reason, it puts me in TV time out.
At least I had a story to put on the air. My story is fresh and exclusive. The viewer at home will never know I was supposed to be live and driving around in the dark of night.
The driving live shot was my producer’s idea. She was very excited. It probably would have looked cool.
Sadly, she was in a control booth, 50 yards away. I guess if she really wanted to know what it looked like, she could have peeked out the back door and taken a picture with her smart phone and sent that to art and then had pre-prod made and then…
Well, that too on this night of gremlins probably would have failed miserably too.
I will email her on the way home.
“Next time we’ll move closer to the loading dock.”
She is good natured and glad we tried.
She is a vet. She knows sometimes S*** just happens.
That’s news. It never stops. The world keeps spinning around the sun.
Tick Tock.
10 O’clock comes and it doesn’t care. It’s ready. It sets the tempo. If you fall out of step, it kicks you in the proverbial news groin.
Ouch!
Tonight the technological demon reared its ugly head, lifted its leg, and saturated us with a heavy dose of “YOU ARE MY BITCH!”
Tonight we were. But today is a new day. We are news people. We will move forward, put on a brand new show and once again, take the reins of this run-a-way steed.
We will once again do the impossible on a shoe string budget and a rubber band pulled too tight.
And then we will make technology our bitch in a never-ending see saw of news.
Life’s Crazy™