Life of Me VII
Life has gotten exponentially better within the past 24 hours.
Thursday morning I didn't get home 'til about a quarter to noon from a meeting with the general manager, news director and executive producer. We were discussing the complete and total transformation of the morning show that's about to transpire in the next two weeks.
It seems like we just reworked the show, and we did. But that was just a little rearranging and doesn't compare to what we're in the process of doing. It's all very exciting.
We basically took the show and blew it up and gathered all the parts into a pile. It looked like what you have when you start a new jigsaw puzzle.
Then we had this three-sheet long timeline broken down into blocks. Currently we have six blocks every hour. When we're done, we'll have nine. That's two more breaks per hour. The current 20-minute long first block will become two blocks.
In essence, we were starting from scratch with the show. Maybe I'm a nerd, but I loved figuring out the layout of the entire show, establishing flow from block to block. It was a throwback to when I would layout the paper in high school or when I established the ladder for the yearbook in college.
My thought process on the whole thing is probably very different from most people in broadcast given my prior history with print. When I'm stacking my show, or in this case creating a show, I envision the transitions as the turning of pages. My goal is to get the viewer to keep turning the pages.
This whole process is just the first step in a much larger goal for the show. Right now, the show is two hours long with the first hour repeating for the second. The goal is for the second hour to eventually become its own show, meaning that hopefully a second producer will be hired for the morning show specifically to produce the second hour.
Finally the higher-ups are standing behind the advancement of the morning show.
And now for the icing on the cake.
Christmas and New Years schedules have been made and displayed on the newsroom door. I checked mine when I got to work Thursday night to make sure of what days my holidays would fall on, and guess what I saw.
Ashton King - pr 6/10
Do you know what that means? I will be off the vampire shift by at least the week before Christmas!
I danced around the hallway in celebration.
6 comments
I'm happy for you, Ashton! Sometimes when you hang tough the universe relents and turns things around for you in a hurry.
ReplyDeleteYour brain is wired the same as mine. I always needed to see the big picture and examine the flow of the newscast from beginning to end. I wanted to make sure transitions were smooth rather than jarring. There's an art to it and you strike me as the consummate artist!
Still trying to figure out how pr 6/10 = off graveyard shift 1 week before Christmas. Hmm!
ReplyDeleteRight now I'm working 11pm to 7am. I'll be going back to working 2pm to 10:30pm.
ReplyDeleteYay! Good for you!! I wish it would be the same for me but I know it won't. The workload during Christmas season is 2 times the normal workload. Apparently, more people get sick during this season and we need to finish all the med reports before the doctors go on vacation.
ReplyDeleteNo idea how to solve the Ashton normal shift equation, but WOOHOO for you!!!!
ReplyDeleteAs soon as they get the new person in here, I'll be back on a normal shift... i.e. sleeping at night time!
ReplyDelete