Live Shots

Live shots (meaning when we go live with a reporter or one of our on-camera personalities from a location outside of the studio) are one of my favorite things to do. We are able to get out in the community and it allows us to be a little more creative and really show our capabilities as a news team. However, there is a lot involved in setting up and executing a live shot - I've had some pretty strange things happen during live shots...

Tonight for example... I was live downtown at the art walk with Randy doing weather for KRBC. We went live for weather during the 5 and 6 shows which means we cut in several times for different shots. The 5 o'clock went just fine - Randy is the greatest at live shots! He never misses a beat. During the six o'clock show we had a little "technical difficulty" attack us. We had a problem receiving a cue to let us know that we were coming up and whoops there were were on the air! Randy was in mid-conversation with one of the ladies he was about to interview and thank goodness he's so great at what he does! He just jumped straight into it but it wasn't without some adjustments and a bit of confusion with me trying to convey in sign language what our producer was telling me in my ear. We got through it with a few hiccups. Andrew was there to document the whole event in photos so I'm sure we'll be seeing that addition to our blog soon. That is just one glimpse at what is actually happening when you see us fumble a few things on air.

Tonight also reminded me of another live shot that took place at that very street corner just a month or so ago...
Maria and I were live downtown and Andrew was live with Dan Edwards near our location. When we do a live shot there is a lot of running of cables - video, audio, power cables and then some. We try to be organized about it but sometimes we have to run the cables across sidewalks, pathways or just in some awkward way have it reach from the live truck to where we are at. So in this case I had run my cables across a sidewalk. Maria and I finished our live shot at 5 and had to wait around for the 6 o'clock live shot so we went over to check out Dan's live weather. To open up one of his segments Dan actually interviewed a bulldog... haha - leave it to Dan to interview an animal. Well... after Dan's live shot was over, Andrew held down the fort at the live vans while Maria and I went to get the team hot dogs and hot chocolate. When I returned I find out that the bulldog that had just had its five minutes of fame had promptly turned around and number two-ed on squarely on my cables... Andrew made the owner clean it up before I got back but I still had to touch those cables when we finished... Yuck. Above is a photo of the culprit and another photo of Maria and I doing our thing that night.