Accelerated Broadcast Club Curriculum

Morning Announcements

It’s no surprise that student retention rates skyrocket when it comes to hands-on learning (MicroTek, 2017). Hands-on learning increases our engagement because it provides us the opportunity to interact with subject matter in a way that feels real. When it comes to understanding broadcast television and streaming media, there is no better way to learn. Walking into a student-run production room during the morning announcements is a sight to see. It may sound cliche, but practice does make perfect and the students at Griswold High School in Griswold, Connecticut, get 180 days of practice every year. As an added bonus, the entire school gets updated on important school news, the weather and birthdays.

I first met the 2018 class of the Griswold High School’s student-run broadcast club on the 2018 Streaming Awards show. The Streaming Awards are an annual event hosted by the StreamGeeks; we started to acknowledge live streaming shows from around the world. This awards show happens every year and the voting is 100% audience driven. With hundreds of contestants from all around the world, some members of our audience were surprised that a high school news announcement team was hovering around the number one and number two ranks for the popular vote.  

Teacher Timothy Moore started the Griswold School Broadcast Club in 1991 and this year the club has 16 student members from grades nine through twelve. The Griswold Broadcast Club reflects the organizational structure of a traditional television production studio which includes a producer, director, technical director, audio chief, teleprompter chiefs, character generators and on-screen talent. An organizational structure like this allows students to come into the program as a freshman and rise through the ranks each year. Moore takes on the producer role during each student announcements production. “It is a student-run organization; I am just here to sit back and watch things go smoothly… and maybe solve some problems here and there when they arise… the students get 180 days of practice each year” says Moore.

The director role is the most important role in the organization and it is generally held by a senior in the club who has excelled through the ranks of the broadcast club. This role is held in such high esteem that a wall in the production studio is dedicated to pictures of past directors. The director must arrive at 7:15, which is 15 minutes earlier than the rest of the team. This role is responsible for checking in with every department head to make sure everything is running smoothly and on-time. Here is a list of duties the director is responsible for:

1. Set an example and show initiative
2. Focus
3. Watch the clock
4. Test all systems a safe time ahead
5. Be ready to give warning and cues
6. Delegate
7. Anticipate and solve problems
8. Be able to work all the equipment
9. Learn the terminology
10. Trace cables
11. Watch meters and levels
12. Review past performance and adjust
13. Rehearse and practice
14. Balance praise and discipline
15. Emulate the experts
16. Develop talent
17. Take inventory

As you can imagine, this is quite a lot of responsibility for a junior or senior in high school. But Moore explained to me, “for the right student, this type of responsibility builds character and prepares students for the real world.” Here is a look at a normal day in the Broadcast Club.

• 7:15 – Students begin arriving
• 7:25 – 10 Minute Warning
  • Latest director can arrive
    • Plug in camera
    • Set trims on microphones
    • Adjust credits
• 7:30 – 5 Minute Warning
  • Cameras must be on tripods and visible in the switcher
  • Mic trim is set
  • AV Test; Check cameras, set chroma key, bring up the banner, check ch19, and troubleshoot
  • Turn off mics on set
• 7:34 – 1 Minute Warning
  • Switch Leightronix to ch6
  • Turn off PA speaker
• 7:34:35 – Quiet on set
  • 30-second warning
  • Turn mics back on
• 7:34:55 – Countdown from 10
• 7:35:05 – Go Live

Directors in the broadcast club are held to a higher standard than entry level positions because they have accepted the responsibility of managing others in the club. They oversee the broadcast workflow in the same way a director works at the orchestra. The technical director works directly under the main director managing the switching software. The switching software being used at Griswold High School is called vMix. The next chapter in this book will be dedicated to the technical implementation vMix inside the club’s video workflow. With the oversight of the club’s producer and director, the technical director manages the video and audio sources available inside vMix. On a normal day, this would include three camera sources and an audio source coming from the audio mixer.

The technical director and audio chief work in sync, to make sure that the audio sources are set to the appropriate levels. The audio chief sits at the audio mixing board with a pair of headphones to listen to each microphone input and set the microphone trim. The technical director will then mute all microphones on set until the notated time of 7:34:35. The audio chief also has the special responsibility of choosing the music used for the days broadcast. Teamwork is paramount here and having all club members working in sync is incredibly important. Everyone in the broadcast club needs to have a working knowledge of the entire workflow. Here is a list of items everyone in the Griswold High School Broadcast Club has a working knowledge of:

1. Identify audio and video cables
2. Put together a camera kit
3. Bring up teleprompter file and hook it into the monitor
4. Cue videotapes / digital recordings
5. Set audio levels
6. Operate the main switcher
7. Ride audio levels
8. Trace video cables
9. Trave audio cables
10. Set up the chroma key
11. Set up lights
12. Update Titles
13. Update public access on both machines
14. Manually focus and adjust the iris on all cameras
15. Recharge batteries
16. Switch Leightronix between PowerPoint, Videonics, and studio
17. Program Leightronix for public access

During a live interview on the 2018 Streaming Awards show, Moore said “We started this club originally just as the morning announcements. We started on VHS over 25 years ago. Ryan is the student director (2018) is a senior about to graduate. Kristin is going to be our director next year.” Moore helps train students in the art of video production. On a recent interview, he stressed the importance of developing a “can-do” attitude with the students. Moore has developed what he calls the “3P Pledge” which is posted in the morning announcement classroom and reads “We are Professional. We set high standards and emulate the experts. We are Proficient. We are able to use all the equipment in the room and produce high-quality video. We are Proactive. We anticipate shortcomings and problems before they arise and prevent them.”

Moore explained to me that there is often a waiting list of students who want to join the club which is why the club makes on-time attendance a high priority. The club has a tardiness policy which is simply “three strikes and you are out.” If students are late more than three times, they will be banished from the club for 45 days. It’s that simple. Also posted in the “Morning Announcements Homeroom Notes” you will find this posted about the tardiness policy “Office excused tardies and late buses are all that will be accepted. You are very important for making the announcements flow smoothly. Any arrival beyond 7:30 is considered a tardy by me. See me if this presents a problem. All levels – managements and lackeys (future management) – are allowed three tardies. All offenders after that will be ostracized to the general populace for 45 days and remain tardy-free for that time period to return.”

Clearly posting rules like this will build trust and responsibility inside the broadcast club. One of the club’s members on the Streaming Awards said “I know personally that being able to be a part of this coming up from Freshman year, has really made quite a difference in my life. Everyone down here that is part of the crew has become like a family. It builds great character. It has helped make coming to school each day even better. This is the place where I found out what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

 

As students rotate through roles and gain positions with more responsibilities, the on-air reader, teleprompter chief, and character generator positions are generally great starting places. The on-air reader role is ideal for students who want to develop their speech and ability to articulate clearly. Students with on-camera positions learn the importance of eye contact. On-air readers learn how to talk to an audience as opposed to reading to them. For students that prefer an off-camera position, the character generator and teleprompter positions are great choices. Operating a teleprompter involves real-time teamwork with the on-air reader. This entry level position is a crucial part of the entire workflow and “Broadcast Club Family.” Since every Director was once a teleprompter operator or on-air reader, the student-run organization can support itself with the experience required for delegation and troubleshooting. Another student in the 2018 broadcast club class said “This group helps you build a lot of responsibilities and character because each one of us has our own individual jobs. We are teleprompter chiefs, we have people who are audio chiefs and character generators and I know ever since I became a co-chief that I come in every day and I can do my work a lot faster than I used to be able to do before.”  

Giving students the opportunity to perform inside a live video production environment is an empowering experience. Another student said during the 2018 Streaming Awards Show “My favorite part is the learning and growing. I remember coming in the first day of freshmen year and being told that I was going to be the on-air reader for the day and I would stutter and it was a terrifying thing. And then I came in halfway through my sophomore year as the chief teleprompter which made it so that if no one else wanted to read, I would have to pick up most of the slack. So that by that time I learned how to keep learning and growing and making sure that I was literate and able to perform just like everyone else. The experience is important, even if you aren’t going directly into the field after you graduate… we can still say that we had this program in high school… so we know how some of this technology works already.”

Now, let’s dig into the nitty-gritty technology that the Griswold High School is using to provide technical jobs for each member of the broadcast club. Many upgrades have been made since the club’s first year in 1991, over 25 years ago. Moore still keeps a closet full of analog gear around for the sake of historical perspective. The way the clubs has grown over the past few years is quite incredible. This student-run broadcast club now uses some of the most advanced video production software available in a way that I find ingenious. In the next chapter, we will lay out the club’s technology setup and explain how they deliver morning announcements to the entire school and local public access television channel with a production crew of 10+ students.

 

How the Griswold High School Uses vMix to Produce The Morning Announcements

I have seen a lot of vMix systems in my career and the Griswold High School morning announcements system is one that makes me smile just thinking about it. The school has managed to involve over 10 real-time student-run operational roles.

Throughout the production of their morning announcements show, the club is using three vMix licenses all run on separate computers. Leveraging the power of the schools Local Area Network (LAN), the club is able to connect four computers together into a single video production environment. We will cover networking in an upcoming chapter, but for now, just understand that each computer is connected together and therefore able to interact with each other and share resources.

The graphic above illustrates the major parts of the video production system. The main computer is running vMix and is controlled by the technical director using a keyboard and mouse. This computer has all three camera sources and the audio mixer connected to it. The second computer is used to display the weathers man’s slides for the day. Using a camera with a green screen, the main vMix computer is able to chroma key the weather man’s background. A chroma key is a video production process for removing a certain color from a video feed to make that color transparent. The video camera feed for the weatherman can then be layered on top of the PowerPoint slides coming in from computer two. In this way, the school can present the weather just like you see on TV.

The weatherman has a wireless PowerPoint remote control that is used to advance the slides from the dedicated computer running PowerPoint. This computer is running a piece of software called the vMix Desktop Capture App which is able to send the full screen of video directly into the main vMix computer for the technical director to use over the network. You can see the “Confidence” monitors which are in place to show the weatherman what he looks like on camera with his PowerPoint slides behind him. This allows the weatherman to see exactly what he is talking about while remaining focused on his delivery to the camera. If this sounds a bit too technical, or a lot all at once, don’t worry. The online training course is going to review this in detail using the same exact software used here.

 

A third computer is used as a character generator. This computer uses the vMix Web Controller to allow the graphics chief to update titles inside vMix and overlay graphics directly onto the broadcast when they are needed. The vMix Web Controller interface is a compact version of the actual vMix interface which is accessible to any computer on your LAN (Local Area Network). This means that you can use any computer with a web-browser on your LAN to control vMix. We will discuss more about local area networks and IP connectivity in a dedicated chapter towards the end of this book.   

The vMix web interface has 4 different areas: shortcuts, controller, tally lights, and titles. These can be changed by clicking the icons along the top. For the graphics chief, they are only concerned with titles and shortcuts. The graphics chief can open up two google chrome web-browsers and split the screen 50/50 to have access to both at the same time. On the titles screen, the graphics chief will see all the titles that are currently in the vMix production on the main computer. From here the operator can quickly edit and change these titles before they are shown on screen.

The shortcuts screen will automatically show all shortcuts that have been set up on the main vMix machine. A shortcut is a trigger that can be designed to perform almost any video production task in the software. This allows the club to give the graphics chief access to specific buttons that can trigger almost any action including fading to the opening video, overlaying graphics, and initiating the closing credits. In the picture above, you can see the shortcut buttons available on the left-hand side of the screen. These include opening, birthdays, lower third, credits and word of the day.

The word of the day is an interesting portion of the show where the club leverages website data to produce up to date information each day. The club uses vMix’s “Web Browser” video input to display this information by entering in the address to the Dictionary.com’s word of the day website (https://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday). Because this webpage is updated every day, the input will always have a new word displayed in its title each day. So, when it comes time to display the word of the day, the graphics chief only needs to click the shortcut button that has been configured to overlay a cropped portion of this webpage onto the screen. The teleprompter chief will check this word and make sure it is included in the script for the on-air talent. The on-air talent will, in turn, make sure they understand the correct pronunciation before the show.

The school birthday title is a ticker that can be updated with information that scrolls across the bottom of the screen. Tickers are used quite commonly in television production to provide additional information in a non-obtrusive way. The graphics chief can quickly update this information inside the titles section of their web controller. If there is a birthday that they need to display in this ticker, they can use the shortcut button to trigger the overlay on and off the broadcast as needed.

Inside vMix, each camera input looks like a square. Each square has a number which corresponds to its position in the production. When the technical director clicks one of these squares, that input is put into the preview window by default. This preview window is the area that the technical director uses to queue up the next upcoming video input for the production. When the technical director is ready to transition to this video input, they can click one of the transition options which are conveniently available directly in between the preview and output screens. vMix also features four layers of overlays and 10 layers of multiview flexibility. With the four layers of overlays, the graphics chief can overlay up to four items on top of the base video layer that the technical director has in the output screen. This is ideal for quickly overlaying lower thirds or ticker titles that may come and go as the technical director switches between the main video sources. Multiview layers work inside each individual input. Using multiview layers the technical director can have a single input setup with multiple layers attached by default into a new composition. The broadcast club does this nicely with the weatherman input. This input is essentially two inputs layered together into one. Using this method, the technical director has just one input to transition to that is built out of the weatherman PowerPoint slides with the chroma keyed video layered on top. Other important buttons that you will learn about in our online course include the record button, the stream button, and the full-screen button.

 

The technical director has a total of 15 inputs inside vMix. The graphics chief controls five of these inputs and the other 10 have been organized into a production workflow for morning announcements. Here are the inputs:

1-4: Camera placeholders (makes shortcuts easier to manage)

5-7: Camera inputs (HDMI internal card, external dual HDMI capture)

8: Opening graphics (Graphics Chief)

9: Virtual camera input with chroma key enabled

10: Credits (Graphics Chief)

11: Birthday Ticker (Graphics Chief)
12: Lower Third (Graphics Chief)

13: NDI in from Weatherman PowerPoint Slides (Weather)

14: Web Browser – (input from dictionary.com cropped for word of the day) (Graphics Chief)

15: Audio Line In

It’s really quite incredible what can be done with this type of network connected video production software. This level of video production quality used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and therefore was out of reach of most broadcast clubs. Most traditional video production switchers have a centralized control system. This type of centralized control has traditionally made it difficult to have multiple people working together. Now school broadcast clubs can build out systems that can integrate teams of students with independent roles working together on a single broadcast simultaneously.  

Further Learning: vMix Master Class –  https://www.udemy.com/vmix-live-streaming/learn/v4/