Inauguration Day 3
Posted Sun, Jan 18th 2009, 15:16Inauguration Day 3
We got up at 2am to make a 3am call at the Mall in Washington. This is that great grassy area between the Capitol and The White House, with the Washington Monument in between.
This is the Mall that thousands filled to hear and see Martin Luther King give his “I have a Dream Speech”. This is the Mall that on Tuesday will be filled with perhaps millions of Americans who want to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.
This is that great Mall that we were expecting to see some sort of set.. or set-up, indicating where the GMA show was being originated.
What we see is pretty much a frozen tundra. Not sets, no lights, no, cables…no nothing! Nada, rien, nichts, nyet!
Now, I am under the impression…the mistaken assumption it turns out, that my charge would be to do a live shot of one of the Sunday GMA correspondents or even maybe a live “pop” with one of anchors.
Oh how wrong can one man be??
Now I ALWAYS come to a job loaded for bear but on this special assignment, my van is really jammed packed with gear, so the unloading begins.
We’re going to be using the Capitol as our background so for the next few hours we set up lighting, run cables, run audio, etc. and pretty soon it starts coming together.
If only it were that easy! However little surprises are yet to unfold.
Like a youth choir from Atlanta singing LIVE.
The sound guys loved that one.
For me, that little added attraction got accented by the producer(s), (hard to keep up with who’s really in charge here), deciding they wanted the choir 180˚ from where we’re doing the anchors. They want to see the Washington Monument in the BG instead of the more iconic Capitol building. That means that somebody has to 180 the lights and cabling in between a commercial break in like what…3 or 4 minutes??
That’d be me.
We do have some utility folk about, but they were really weren’t assigned to us. There were there to help with props and wrangle the Yellow Jackets. Those are protective covers that the park service wants all the electrical cables to be housed in.
And speaking of props… another little ditty on us that was sprung on us.
A table filled with Obama products they wanted to do some shtick with. Only trouble is they had the table set up in like Virginia and we’re in the District.
That’s local talk for Washington, DC!
At that point I suggested in a calm, collected way…GET THE UTILITI GUYS TO CARRY THE TABLE TO THE SET PEOPLE!!!
It was a V-8 moment for the producer and all went well with that segment.
All in all the chaos actually worked and we did the show like we knew what we were doing…which we didn’t but nobody at home noticed.
The audio team was really thrown a curve however.
The producer had just come off the Obama train event where they lost audio for 20 minutes do to wireless mic issues, so at the 11th hour she wants all 8 mic feeds to be hard wired or cabled. Very little time left here so my soundman, Walter James, hard wired the main anchors, Bill Weir and Kate Snow but stayed wireless for the other 6 mics and all was good.
A calculated gamble for sure, because if we did have some sort of mic frequency issues, the Do-Do would have been flying high and wide!!
It worked and the producer never knew.
As predicted, we did redo some of the segments for the west coast because well, it got lighter out and it looked prettier; and since we already did a live rehearsal for the east coast, the rough edges have been smoothed out so why not?
The west coast, which rarely gets a live feed of a news show, does in fact get a prettier feed that is pretty glitch free.
We on he east coast see TV in the raw, the way God intended.
Today was probably our toughest day. We’ve got nothing until tomorrow afternoon when we need to set up the pool camera for the Mid-Atlantic Ball at the convention center. I’m thinking this may be the ball for the common folk but with 10 balls, who knows.
All I do know is we need to set a camera position and run some audio and video cable for Tuesday night.
Now how hard can that be??
