Wednesday, October 26, 2011

So Blog Again - I will

I am committed to continue to tell stories about Action Television | Action Media and the work we do. So this week has been spent preparing for a television show shoot in Dallas, Texas at an Edwin Watts store. We will be shooting Golf Life Holiday presented by the aforemented Edwin Watts Golf. The program will be a well rounded look at new equipment for 2012, gift ideas for golfers, tips and drills to help in the off season and some winter travel ideas to get out of the snow.

When you begin a project like this it is obviously key to have a distribution platform to work from. Fortunately, we have worked directly with the folks at FSN and Comcast Sports Net for some time and they have come to trust our programming. In fact, we started our first series just over 18 years ago and I'm excited to note that we will hit 20 years in January of 2012. So the ability to have our shows seen in key timeslots is really what makes this thing tick. I still believe anyone can do this if they put their minds to it. Television is still important and a great catalyst to everything you want to do with online, mobile and connected TV.

So back to our shoot. We will be hitting the ground on Tuesday morning and here is where the reality of cable budgets hits hard. We are going directly from the airport with the gear we are carrying and meeting up with a full crew we have never worked with to shoot at a golf course I have never seen. Now most producers would lose their minds to think of such a reality. Mine is that we do this all the time and somehow it works out. In my estimation - you must trust your instincts and have solid conversations to assess who you are hiring. Then you must clearly communicate your intentions and needs to the keeper of the location you are going to be using - in this case a golf course. My gate man is a very nice head golf professional (whose name escapes me currently) and he has chosen to shut down one hole on his course for us. Very nice of him, he has been around a while.

The real challenge in doing this type of show is to visualize the segments. Don't get trapped into one style of segment, make sure you think of different ways to get your message across. In our case - I've put together a running script that allows for a lot of interview driven segments and a few hosted pieces. As this is a half hour show - I don't want to bore my audience with a completely host driven piece. It gets too heavy with the host and becomes boring. Also in terms of production, it becomes laborious to setup the two shot all day. So use your host sparingly, more as a transitional element, than a main presenter. Let the host come in and out of the show and move things along. This works for me and makes the coordination of each segment in this show much easier to navigate.

I'll post more about this shoot later... thanks for the tune in.

videomichael