TELEVISION THAT TEACHES

HOW YOU SEE IT...

Lights! Camera! Create!

Making news, making television

by Ben Barnhart

Don’t slouch! Look up!” barks junior Jessica Johnson, as three baby-faced news anchors swelter and squint under hot lights in a cavernous studio in the basement of the Student Union. “And speak s-l-o-w-l-y,” she implores.

     Johnson is president of the Union Video Center, the student-run TV station that feeds programming onto Channel 19 of the university’s Housing Services Cable Network, and she’s beginning to show the strain of successive long nights in the editing room as the production team struggles to get the latest edition of UMass This Week on tape. Her on-air crew – news anchors Olivia Blanco Mullins ’01 and Jamie Loo ’03 and entertainment reporter Ben Nicotera ’03 – nod sullenly until Mullins breaks into a huge grin and says, with a laugh,“Stop staring!” The mounting tension is broken.

     It’s 9 p.m. at mid-week, but the Union Video Center is buzzing with activity. At an hour when many students are watching television, these dozen or so are making television: editing feature-length movies, special projects, or “packages” – segments for the weekly half-hour news show that’s being recorded in the studio. Others are hanging out in the station’s dingy corridors talking shop.

     UVC is supported by the student activities trust fund and the several thousand dollars it raises each year by producing and selling videos of commencement. Among its paid staff of fourteen and general membership of 180 are students of all backgrounds, interests, and majors, brought together by a shared desire to create video. Naturally, many are interested in journalism or communications, but relatively few are majoring in those fields.

     Johnson, for instance, is an economics major, and news producer Rebecca Sablo ’02 is enrolled in the social thought and political economy program. Many UVC members also have their fingers in the campus’ other media outlets, such as WMUA and The Daily Collegian. Vice-president Shawn Downs ’01, one of those hanging around the studio this evening has been both a WMUA disc jockey and a Collegian columnist, and characterizes UVC as a microcosm of UMass.

     “It’s what you make of it,” says Downs, a massive, talkative chap who seems eternally caffeinated. “There’s a lot of potential here to do very creative things” – for example, his own full-length feature film, Noise, a “college comedy” that he began writing his freshman year and produced with UVC equipment.

UVC members complete a series of four workshops that cover the basics of production, editing, and equipment use before they’re let loose upon the world with the center’s super-VHS cameras, tripods, microphones, lights, and linear and non-linear editing systems to produce programming for the dormitory community.

     “We think of this as a co-curricular environment,” says technician Jim Gagne, who, along with newly-hired general manager Marsha Shoeffler comprise the station’s non-student staff. “It’s a place where students come to learn the practical behind the theory.”

     The resulting programming runs the gamut of student interests: athletics, talk shows, music videos, on-campus lectures, cultural and political events, and issues-oriented programming on such subjects as prejudice or alcohol abuse. Some of the work produced by UVC members is for credit, but often students simply have a message and TV19 is their mouthpiece.

     Cameraman Michael Ouellette ’03 zooms in on Mullins’ face as she gives a rundown of the week’s headlines followed by Sablo’s three-minute documentary on protesters at the International Monetary Fund’s conference in Washington. Next up is Loo’s student-on-the-street survey of Southwest residents responding to the vandalism, suspensions, and proposals for dorm security cameras that followed from a recent power outage on campus. After an esoteric segment on new “funny” techno music and a calendar of the weekend art happenings by Nicotera, Andrea Crane ’02 gives a well-rehearsed reading of sports headlines and Jim Landry ’03 delivers his weather routine in front of a blank blue “chromo-key” wall. (Maps and graphics will be added in the editing room.)

     UVC students inevitably learn to deal with the technical difficulties that plague such high-tech undertakings. Tonight, for example, the microphone picks up the click-and-whir of a visiting photographer’s camera and the din of an event going on upstairs in the Cape Cod Lounge. Having these kinds of problems to solve is partly what makes UVC such a valuable stepping-stone for the video-inclined, says David Skillicorn ’77.

     Skillicorn is the founding producer of Chronicle, the weekly news magazine from WCVB Channel 5 in Boston, and back in 1976 he founded the UMass Student Video Project, which evolved into the UVC. As an undergrad in communication, Skillicorn discovered a small trove of unused video equipment in the campus center. He borrowed the gear, taught himself how to use it, and began recruiting fellow students to form a video club.

     “I was so excited that I wanted to establish something that would last, something that would be bigger than my own interest in making films,” says Skillicorn. So he went dorm-to-dorm “selling” the project to fellow students, and what began as a small circle of enthusiasts grew into a full-fledged registered student organization with a growing list of members. Skillicorn’s determination to start a video club at UMass also helped launch his own successful career in television production. The producer for seventeen years of Chronicle, he’s won national awards, including Emmys, teaches at Boston University, and has gained wide recognition for his work. Much of his success, he says, can be attributed to those early days at UVC.

     “You learn to make things work,” says Skillicorn of the UVC experience. “I was able to land my first jobs because of that.”

Former UVC president Scott Perry ’93, ’98G has also used the center as a career springboard. Perry has taken his production and editing skills all the way down North Pleasant Street to Furcolo Hall, where he holds the official title of coordinator for UMass Educational Television.

     His unofficial titles – and they are many – are much loftier, according to UMET co-director and professor of education Liane Brandon. A grateful Brandon likens Perry to a deity; indeed, he does seems omniscient, or at least omnipresent, in the basement hallways of Furcolo. He is the connection between the brains – the conceptualization of UMET programming – and the brawn, the nuts and bolts of scheduling, taping and editing. He confers with Brandon and CO-director Jay Carey about long-range programming and distribution plans, tutors student interns, and does much of the technical work of setting up cameras and lighting locations for taping.

     Since its beginning in 1994, UMET has produced TV that strikes a balance between education and entertainment and appeals to adult as well as juvenile audiences. The shows are cablecast on local access channels in Amherst, Northampton, and several other communities throughout the state.

     “TV is always criticized as a passive medium,” says Carey. “The question we ask ourselves is: ‘How can we produce things that are more interactive and more socially stimulating?’” Between Brandon’s experience as an independent filmmaker, Carey’s expertise in child development, and Perry’s myriad skills and limitless energy, the trio are doing their bit to reinvent the genre of educational television. UMass’ school of education, they say, is the only one in the country producing television for export.

     They’ve come up with some engaging series. The long-running Try This At Home gives parents and kids projects to work on together in the kitchen or backyard. Past shows like Fresh Ink, which featured poetry written and presented by local high school students, and Fine Print, a series of interviews with some of UMass’ best authors, including John Edgar Wideman, Dara Wier, Martín Espada, Noy Holland, and James Tate, were produced with adolescents and adults in mind.

     Ever seeking a wider audience and longer life for its product, UMET signed a contract with Cinema Guild this fall for distribution of the Fine Print series to schools, libraries, and television stations worldwide. While UMET may gain royalties from the agreement, Brandon says the important benefit of the distribution deal is visibility for UMass, the school of education, and the writers featured in the series.

UMET often taps the UMass community for resources and information in the production of its programs. One of its longest running shows, Who Knows, seeks questions on nearly any subject from the public, then presents an in-depth answer by an expert in that field. Often those experts are UMass faculty.

     Using a wooden clothespin, Perry gingerly makes adjustments to a hot tungsten light that lends a warm glow to a kitchen classroom in Chenoweth Lab. As he moves the light, his crew – grad students Greg Bascomb and Vincent Doyle and interns Lydia Lestage ’00 and Alexis Gelburd ’01, along with Brandon, who has stopped in for the pre-taping setup – give criticisms and suggestions. It’s purely a democratic process and everybody’s got an opinion.

     “Hmmm. The red’s too much, try a different gel.”

     “That’s better. Now maybe a little less light on the background.”

     Gradually the team reaches consensus on the lighting, camera angle, and composition. Linda Kinney, a lecturer in the hotel, restaurant and travel administration department, is standing by to answer questions about the history of fast food and the invention of pizza for this segment of Who Knows. After lighting and sound checks Perry pulls out a comb to adjust a few stray locks of Kinney’s hair.

     It’s this kind of attention to detail that separates the professional from the amateur production, Perry says. While UVC gives students freedom to experiment and to make mistakes, UMET’s audience is less forgiving.

     “We tell our students that it’s OK to be bad; but if you’re bad, you’ve got to fix it. We expect you to get it right.”

     Perry works with seven interns – many of them UVC veterans like him – and three graduate teaching assistants from diverse academic programs. The teaching element is an important aspect of UMET, and another of Perry’s numerous skills that the program relies on. Communications major Alexis Gelburd, who invests at least eight hours per week at UMET, credits Perry with strengthening her editing skills and making her more comfortable behind the camera – something she loathed before this internship. “He’s given me more experience than the classes I’ve taken,” she says. “And he pays more attention than some professors.” Gelburd returned to UMET this fall for a second year-long internship.

     As Kinney traces the long evolution of modern-day pizza from its invention by the Etruscans to Greece, Italy, and, ultimately, New York City, grad student and interviewer Greg Bascomb allays any nervousness, gently excusing her misspeaks and re-takes. After an hour of taping, Perry and his crew feel they have enough for the twenty-minute segment that will air.

     As you might expect of someone in the television production business, Perry says that he watches “too much” TV. But, he’s quick to add, “even if we see a lot of television, we don’t necessarily like a lot of it.” He feels UMET has staked a claim to TV’s higher ground with programming that seeks to invigorate the mind rather than deaden it. He credits Brandon with encouraging a philosophy that makes UMET a leader in educational TV rather than a follower.

     “As Liane says,” he recounts proudly, “‘you can sit at home and criticize television, or you can go out and do it better.’”

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