An Inside Look at Outlook

WKYU-PBS's public affairs program, Outlook is currently in it’s 22nd season of production. Although Outlook is a professional studio production, many viewers do not know that most of the production is done by students. As members of the student crew, we were asked to produce a piece designed to show the viewer a side of Outlook not seen before, an inside look.

Shooting was a fairly simple process. We used two Sony PDW-700 HD cameras with Canon lenses. In the control room we used a wide angle lens to capture 2-shots and 3-shots in a confined area. In the studio a telephoto lens allowed us to not interfere with the production but still capture close-ups and details in the studio.

The control room was dimly lit, so we used two Lowel Tota flood lights, bounced off the ceiling from about three feet away. We placed the lights in opposite corners of the room in order to evenly illuminate the small control room without causing any harsh shadows.

To shoot the interviews, we used an LEDz Trio Kit and the Outlook set as a backdrop. The Outlook set has a lighting system with the capability to change colors, so we used this to our advantage and switched colors between interviews. We shot most of our subjects in front of the Outlook set to show that they are a part of the production, but not on the show itself. When interviewing the director, Josh Niedwick, we set him in the control room to reflect his role in the production.

Post Production was a more difficult and tedious process than expected. We put together a three minute rough cut, but decided that the content focused on too many aspects of the show for that short amount of time. We found that we couldn’t provide enough details for each point that we had outlined so we scrapped the idea completely. Starting again from scratch, we directed our content in a way that focused more on the students' role in the production and less on the show itself.

Throughout producing this three minute piece, we learned the importance of using lights to separate the subject from the background. This is key to showing the details of the hair and shoulders of the subject. We also learned that you can never shoot too much B-Roll which is a problem that arose as we were desperately searching for more footage near the end of post. Also, we learned something that we feel is crucial to creating stories: Know what you want, but always be willing to change. We had a thought of what we wanted the piece to look like, but after all the interviews we realized that maybe it would flow better going a different route. We hope you agree.

Austin Anderson, WKU Junior & Cameron Epperson, WKU Sophomore

An Inside Look on Outlook from WKU ETV - PRODUCTION on Vimeo.