February Is Ending

Well much has happened in the past five or six weeks...

Planet Forward (my internship) has taken on some serious power of its own that we could never have for-seen. We finished our three and a half weeks of production with a total of 13 videos. Each video was shot in 1080i HD format. The videos were about everything from wind power and public transit to biofuel and green buildings.

The nine students on the team put in a lot of hard work, as did the three administrators that we worked under. In the end we had a bunch of videos and a bunch of people to show them to.

First, we showed our work to Lynne Fawthrop who is the dean of students at our school. This served as a preliminary for our meeting with the president in that we were able to get an outside reaction and could also work out the technical kinks for our meeting with him.

The next step was showing the University President Roy Nirschel. Our first meeting had its fair share of technical problems including some issues that arose from the exporting of the movie files from computer to dvd format. We were able to resolve these issues, however, upon arriving to the conference room (luckily thirty minutes prior to the meeting) we encountered an unforseen issue that the outlet we attached our computer to was supposedly fried.

However, with quick thinking we decided to scrap the idea of projecting the videos from the tv screen and simply put the lap-top directly in front of the President. While at first this seemed to be a major cut in resources, it ended up being great to have the team crowded around the President at the end of the table. Rather than sitting down at the end and staring at him, we shared the viewing of the videos with him.

In both of our meetings within the university our projects were received with great appreciation and excitement. This was incredibly rewarding and the team was very releived to have been through with the experience.

The big step was for team leaders Mike Scully and Judi Johnson, accompanied by team member and software tech Mike Spark, to fly down to PBS in Washington, DC to present our work directly to the head of Planet Forward Frank Sesno, formerly of CNN. The team was tense. Although our work passed the preliminary test with our educators, we now buckled down for the reaction of TELEVISION PROFESSIONALS.

And wrongfully so. Our apprehensions were once again proven folly. Sesno and his associates at PBS were thrilled with our work. They found it to be just about everything the program is supposed to be about. After talking and thinking about it for a while, PBS extended an invitation for the team to go down to Washington DC at the PBS headquarters to be there for the filming of the April 15th television broadcast. The school considered it and decided to send us down on a working trip.

Needless to say, myself and the team were thrilled beyond beleif and are supremely excited to be heading to DC for the filming.

So there it is, workin for PBS. No big deal, right?