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Cause aint nobody got time for Amateur's
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education. This is
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is talking with the pros.
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The pros.
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Like, professionals. This is Talking With The Pros with me, Jess Speight. I speak to the professionals in the world of audio to gain an insight into what it takes to become a pro. Talking With The Pros. RT, thank you so much for being here with Talking With The Pros. Thank you for having me. Appreciate you taking the time to come and talk with us. Tell me about your field of interest. What got you loving what you do?
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I mean, I work in TV production, broadcasting. I just fell in love with it by doing it. When I was a student here, I was working with the radio station.
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Nice.
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Found out there were opportunities to work with UNLV TV. Okay. Started doing that. I just really loved it. Though it was, for me, the way that I fell in love with it was literally by doing it. I really kind of am one of those rarities that, you know, I actually enjoy my job. It can be stressful. Stressful is all hell. We had a very stressful day recently when we had multiple systems that were all kind of dying all at once, but I figured it out. So, you know, got through it.
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And that's the nature of production, right?
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Oh, very, very much so. I have a saying. I also teach, I say to them is, we don't freak out, we figure it out. Right? Because in live production, there's an expletive we use that basically rhymes with it. It happens. We say that quite often because it does very often. That's very much a part of production is, you know, don't freak out, figure it out, because you need to figure out another way to get around it. And if you're freaking out, there's no way you're going to be able to figure it out. That's kind of my mentality, because a lot of can go wrong in production.
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Yeah.
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So talk about how you were actually part of the UNLV radio, like the KUNV side. Dipped your toes in there?
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Yeah, actually. Yeah, I got in pretty early, basically right at the onset of HD2 station. We didn't have a lot of students, not a lot of student staff, not a lot of people know this. I was actually the second president of the station. Wow!
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I'm incoming president. Yeah. Yeah.
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Yeah, not a lot of people know that so yeah I was president and I did my show I mean that was that was before you know that we had a solid format So everybody's show was different and mine was called b-sides featuring bands. You know songs You don't a few bands you never heard of
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Yeah, right
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Because I mean you think about the albums that you know the albums that you love and there's really only four or five songs that make it on the radio that are like the big hits that everybody knows. So that show was all about playing the other six, seven, eight tracks that are on an album, right? And that was the show and it was great because, you know, I didn't have a lot of listenership but, you know, the people that were listening appreciated it because it wasn't the same old table. That was pretty great. That was what I did. Yeah, and that old tagline, broadcasting from the basement of UNLV, that was me.
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I love that. That's awesome. That's my favorite line. That's what got me here. I'm like, a basement?
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Yeah, right? Right? I'm interested. Yeah, so yeah, it was a pretty special time, but it was a long time ago.
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Longer than I care to say. But, yeah. That's awesome. So you know about audio and the radio side of it. And you were saying that you also teach here.
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I do.
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What other things, you know, are you doing with the teaching side? Just briefly. And then we'll come back.
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Teaching, I mean, it's known as Journalism 325 in the, you know, the record books. Make it sound awesome. But you know what I mean? Course catalog. Course catalog. There we go. I mean, it's electronic media production too. So I teach them all about news and how news works and different story formats, because a lot of people think it's just a package and there's way more than that. So we go over that and everything, just all things media, really, and it's more than just news. They shoot more, they shoot other.
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So you dipped your toes into the radio and then you found broadcasting. What drawed you to that part? Was it the behind the scenes? Was it the production and everything that goes in? The pre-production for a show?
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Yeah, yeah, pretty much all of it. You know, because after I graduated, I went to work immediately over at Channel 8. I was an editor over there for a long time. They call it a production specialist. So that's basically a camera operator in the studio, right? I did that for a while, and then I left, and that's how I ended up over here, so you know that took you know five years professional experience that I had in TV news and Something that you know some people say about working in TV news that it five years is ten years It's really five years of ten years just because of the medium You know breaking news and just just of the sheer volume of shows You know depending on the place that you work at yeah, I had worked there, and then came over here. So yeah, I've been kind of like all over with broadcasting, started with radio, got into, you know, TV, you know, true terrestrial broadcasting over the air. And then now I'm mostly a digital broadcasting. That's awesome. Were you ever in front of the
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camera over there? No, no, no, always, always behind the camera. I'm definitely in the rear with the gear kind of guy. I love that. I love that as well. That's another fun thing about the radio is that I'm behind a mic and I'm in my own environment, but it's still going out there and reaching out to people.
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And that's what I always thought about it, is that no matter what, yeah, you're by yourself in the studio, or in this case, you know, it's the two of us having this conversation with you, but I'm having the conversation with everybody, right? And you know, that's especially in a radio setting when you're playing music, you know, when you have your hit, you go on and you're talking to everybody and you're not getting the feedback, it's knowing that's what we signed up for, right? That's definitely what you signed up for and that's such an interesting thing to get used to because you're doing it and you're talking, but who are you talking for? I mean, it's for that listener. So you need to be in that listener mindset while you're also talking. So I always thought that was such an interesting thing to get into.
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Yeah, that's so perfectly put. So you moved from broadcast on local TV news and now you came back. You came back to UNLV. Yeah, yeah, I ended up over here. Yeah, after
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after a while they wanted me to teach, so I've been teaching since 2019 now. Doing just a lot of TV production. UNLV TV, we do have a relatively high volume of clients and productions that we do. It's been doing a lot of everything. And during the pandemic, I mean, that was kind of a crazy time for us. We became fully booked. Yeah, we became a streaming hub. You know, the TV did because there's a there's a lot of content makers here on campus. There's a lot of people that know how to shoot with a camera. They know how to get good audio with it because that's kind of the biggest thing. You know, video can be crushed by not having good audio. So there's a lot of people that know how to do that on campus, because of what everybody was kind of going through, and everybody had to be kind of split up and everything. We became a streaming hub, because we're very good at what we do. And we're very good at streaming, and being able to provide multi cameras, streaming pretty much anywhere. But at that time, I was also working in Channel five director over there And that's a completely different environment because that's an automated television environment and that what would an automated television look like? Automated television is a completely different beast because in the TV studio you have your anchors right there in there And there is no camera operators in the studio at all. And that's pretty customary in a studio like what we have. Because we have camera operators, we have a floor director on the floor, we have people directing the anchors and reporters around. At an automated station, none of that. The director is responsible for video playback, for CGs, for the audio, for directing, advancing the show, and all those things. But it's all broken down to basically being one button. Like we code everything out so that it knows I'm gonna do this camera, this microphone, this graphic, and I'm gonna do exactly all of these things in this order. So we would code it in that order and that's how an automated news environment works. It's also kind of weird because you can mess things up and then all of a sudden a camera goes flying across the studio. So yeah, you got to watch out for
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those things.
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Yeah, definitely happened.
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Yeah, watch your head. Yeah. I know I was interested in thinking about doing double majors. But so I do appreciate and I have a love for production side. If somebody like myself was interested in doing that major, what are some things that people wouldn't expect that go on and go into that side of the project?
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One of the biggest things that I would say is that there's a lot more than just putting on the show, right? Because there's all the pre-production, sometimes there's post-production, you know, it just kind of depends on the content that you're creating. So yeah, there can be a lot of pre-production. That might be going out and shooting footage for B-roll or for packages and getting sound from people, interviews and such. That might mean, you know, getting set pieces and building a set, things like that. Fortunately here at UNLV we have our set, so, you know, we're pretty well positioned there. of it almost like making a movie, right? They don't show up to the movie set and start that day, you know, the directors and the producers, they're working on all kinds of different things beforehand. Same thing goes for TV, you know, definitely not as much as, you know, making a movie, but it really is the same thing. And it's a fast-paced environment. Oh, exactly, exactly, especially like a live TV environment. I mean, you're going to do that one show that day and then tomorrow it's gonna be a completely different show and the next day a completely different show and the next day another completely different show. Yeah it's completely completely fast-paced and you know it's all about it's all about being topical right? Talking about what's happening right now you know and there might be some follow-up to something that might have happened a couple days ago new information that's been released but yeah it's always you know putting out that new information. And a chase for that content. Oh yeah, definitely.
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When you're doing your rundowns, it's like breaking news and now everything's changed.
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Exactly. Yeah, I've worked plenty of newscasts, professional newscasts over at Fox 5 and Channel 8 where the producers' entire rundown, and the rundown is where they sack the entire show. That's the first story, the top story, then the next story, then weather, then you know, all those things, right? An entire producers rundown just gets thrown out the window because there's, you know, a shooting somewhere or or a fire somewhere. Or maybe the president wants to make a national address. As broadcasters, we know that we have to make that that those things available through terrestrial broadcasting means so yeah the other channels are doing it exactly yeah bring your side trying to trying to trying to break get that viewership on your side too right there's definitely a lot to it and yeah with production there's a lot more to like I said just putting on the show there's everything that comes before it potentially a lot that comes after it you know again also like a movie there's still all the editing you know taking all the everything that was shot and you know, re reimagining it TV, not nearly as intricate. So, you know, we might need to do some editing afterwards, maybe we didn't do graphics on screen while we were recording it. So we, you know, add those in post, you know, so there's there's pre production, the production and post production. So there's, you know, a lot to it.
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A lot to it. You mentioned like sound sound bites. Yeah, I'm figuring like, when you're when people go out and record something live like on the street. Yeah, exactly
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They count everything with the sound, you know in our case in like a news in like a news environment for example going out and getting interviews from people that are this is what I always say in my in my you know, In my 325 class because it's it's the first half of it is very very news-based Interview should be somebody that's connected or affected to the story, right? So, you know, talking about a story about, you know, a house fire that happened the other day. Somebody connected or affected might be a person who lived in the house or, you know, a neighbor who knows the people that lived there, right? These are directly connected and affected and or affected by the story. The PIO, the public information officer from you know the police or fire directly connected or affected right? So yeah so when you get audio and you're getting that sound from people those are the people that you want to want to go for every every single time. If you're just grabbing you know person on the street you know that's that's not so great. You don't want to work on that POS, right?
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Yeah. Also, with production, there's mics flying everywhere. There's so you have the cameras when the audio comes in and when it doesn't.
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Oh, man, that's scary. So I actually had a, an interview that I conducted a few couple months ago, I was using this double mic, I've retested it and retested and it works perfectly fine right now that day I thought it was working properly and it turns out it turned out. It was not oh no and Fortunately she was sitting the woman who was wearing the bad microphone was sitting next to her husband Who was wearing the good microphone, and they were sitting right next to each other she wasn't very soft-spoken So she she spoke up so that that definitely helped you know all wasn't lost You know and that just took a little bit of post editing afterwards to kind of bump her up a little bit when some of her
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Lower parts, you know just is what it is sometimes. Yeah, that's a happy mistake. Yeah Yeah, that one. Yeah, there's instances when say somebody didn't get picked up then what what happens then? Hope that you're able to reshoot it or run a mic live on TV.
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Yeah, maybe.
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You know, it actually did happen to me last summer and fortunately the person that I was shooting with, his office is right in the Student Union, so right across from our building. I just text him, like, hey man, I messed up, you mind if I come back over? It'll take 15 minutes. He was totally cool with it. So I was able to go, you know, reshoot that. It was just fine. So I got lucky in that case. That's not always going to be the case. So yeah,
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yeah, like I'm thinking like live.
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So in live. Yeah, I mean, in live, basically, you just kind of move on, you know, because you're you and I've had that happen. I've definitely had that happen where in a live news setting, the anchor, we always do a mic check. We always do a mic check beforehand. Some anchors will, for some reason, do a mic check and then turn it right back off. I don't know why, but I've had this happen plenty of times. Yeah, I guess so, but they're just sitting in the studio. So it's like, come on. You know, they'll do the mic check, mic check's good, and then they'll turn it right back off, and then they go for their live hit and they forget to turn it back on and me the director I'm thinking I've already checked your mic. You should be good. What's the problem? So they they go up and then there are microphones on I was like where's his mic where's his mic? Where's his mic and this is literally what I would do I would wonder like where's the mic where's the mic all right? I'm taking the package taking the package roll And I would just hit it and I would just I would just go into it and then as soon as we're in the package I would get and get into their ear, tell them, Hey, put on your mic, like, turn it on. Probably wouldn't call them that. But still, it's like, that's how I feel. Yeah, I would tell them to get their get their mic on because they messed up because they're going to wonder why it's like, why do you roll my package? Because you messed up.
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Right.
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And I did what I had to do because their mic is obviously not being picked up from a director standpoint. Yeah, I would just if their mic just go silent. But they're talking like I can see their lips moving, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna roll into the package and then I'm gonna get in their ear and tell them like all right wrap it up and you can take the producer will likely give them a little bit extra time for the wrap just because they you know killed they lost that time in the beginning but yeah so then we'll just tell them and then they'll come back and they'll they generally don't mention it they generally don't mention it they'll come back on and then they'll just act as if it didn't happen. Right. Because we like to pretend like, you know, stuff like that didn't happen. So yeah, they'll come back and they'll just do their outro. Exactly. Or in this case, you didn't hear anything. Yeah, nothing happened over here. Ignore that. So yeah, so we just send it into the package, let them tag it out like we normally call it, intro. They missed the intro because of their microphone. Now they're on their tag, they can tag it out and we can we can hear them just fine. So I'll get another mic check while we're in the package and then yeah, they're good to go.
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Yeah, that's great though that you're able to, you know, get some kind of line of communication through their ear.
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Yeah, yeah, they're usually, they're always wearing an IFP. In a professional setting, they're always wearing an IFP. That stands for Interruptible Feedback. It's basically, they're listening to the mix of the show Minus their microphone, so they have mix minus is what that's called And if they have their microphone if they don't have mix minus they're they're gonna get an echo, right? They're they're gonna talk and they're gonna hear themselves in there in their microphone at a slight delay and it will mess them up So you'll see it from time to time when you know, maybe a live reporter out in the field, you know Maybe maybe the the in-house audio person or maybe maybe even in the field, the audio is messed up and they're they're you know not getting mixed minus so they'll start and then they'll pull their earpiece out because they're they're getting that then they'll try to fix it right away you know once once they're in the package and everything and you know do it do what they need to do but yeah you definitely don't want to hear yourself in your own ear when you're talking because it's at a very very slight delay it's very very weird it's very very weird. They can hear the show. Yep, they hear the entire show. They can hear the package rolling, anchor mics, every other mic except their own. They're also getting, and this is why it's called an IFB, interruptible feedback, that audio can be interrupted by the producer and or the director. That's how we get in their ear and tell them, hey, do this, do that. And it's just, that's the standard protocol. That's the way it works. And me as a director, I've had plenty of mistakes. I've had plenty of successes. So, and that's exactly what I tell my students and that's what I bring to the table I've been through a lot of the problems that they are going to find themselves in and I will lead them I will guide them through it because I've been there, you know, don't freak out figure it out. Come to me I'll help you figure it out. So we don't need to freak out. So like let's get this done. That's so great
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You're there to teach the next and up and coming. What is one thing that you find most rewarding in your classes? They're learning everything pretty much for the first time, they're walking through it, it's something they're interested in. What's something that you help tell them to motivate them to go forward?
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Tell them, let them know that it's not easy, but it's doable. That's going to be a lot of things in life. You know, things aren't going to be easy, but they're surprisingly doable. It just takes doing, you know, and definitely one of the most rewarding things that I ever generally get to see when I end the semester. This is something that I always ask at the end of the semester. I ask by a show of hands, do you feel like you learned something? Every hand, every semester goes up. And it's like, damn, like, that's, yes. I don't need them to know everything. I just need to know that they learned something like our time together wasn't wasted over 15 weeks or However, many short weeks on a summer class. So yeah, that's definitely the best part
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Is it more like quick like rundown people are interested in taking your class in 325 basically there?
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Yeah, they're learning a bunch of different story formats so that's the really news heavy side and then we Then we do a special project for the for the midterm with what's called the Urban Adventure that happens with criminal justice. Oh yeah. So they get involved with that, kind of treating it like a real, actual true to life crime scene. Just like CRJ does. Rather than being the investigators of the crime scene, they're the reporters that are
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there.
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On the scene. On the scene, exactly. So yeah, that's the midterm. And then after that we get into some other things. They do a vlog, we look at some social media, social media style videos, a few other things, do a music video. Well-rounded. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, yeah, they get a good amount of everything. Because I like to think that the media that we watch is created on more simple means than the super-duper high-grade professional gear, right? A lot of people are shooting on their phones, a lot of people are shooting on their own personal DSLR cameras. You don't need to have a cinematic camera to get a cinematic look. However, a lot of phones, more modern phones than mine, I got an iPhone X, they have the cinematic mode on them and they look amazing. They do look really, really good. Yeah, a lot of the media that we consume is not made by the super duper, duper high professional grade equipment. Because people are always looking at stuff on their phone listening to stuff on their phone How many you see it on Instagram? It's just you know independent music artists who are like hey check out this song It's coming out this Friday right they can put stuff on iTunes. They can put stuff on Spotify themselves It's not that hard distribution for music is completely completely changed I don't know how long but it's completely completely changed And then you can do it do it with music videos to with YouTube and things like that The world is changing like you know you don't need the big guy sure anymore sure and that's what's really cool about it
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Something could produce quality and then knowing the skills behind how to do something like cinematic like sure There's a button, but we know there's like different angles that to capture. Yeah to bring that elevated look and Yeah, as well as the sound you're gonna want everything to have a high quality, but it's doable.
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Yeah, it's the equipment, but it's the knowledge too. And if you have that, you can do a lot of really cool things with not a lot of stuff.
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Yeah, and then learning with your eye and your ear technique. I know when I've taken classes before for video production, all I'm thinking is like, oh, that headroom.
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Yeah, having a lot of headroom. It's terrible
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Yeah, just using that rule of thirds. Yes. Yes. I love video. I love Photography and I love audio all those little things just are so interconnected Yeah, and it goes hand in hand. You can't have one without the other just thank you again RT for just highlighting Just a few of those aspects for us and sharing with us all that you're doing here at UNLV and what you have done in the past professionally. So I would consider you a professional. So thank you again. Any last words that you want to tell us before we go?
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No, other than just get out and do it.
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Yeah, thank you so much, RT. Great motivation and I'll see you next time. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and if you missed any of today's episode. You can find us anywhere podcasts are available like Spotify, Google, and Apple podcasts. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Talking with the Pros with me, Jess B. I love you and I'll catch you in the next Talking with the Pros with me, Jess B. I love you and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye!
Transcribed with Cockatoo