Dance of the Production Crews
Posted by robynh | Filed under Total Solar Eclipse: Live from China, dispatch
I’ve been in China for three days, but it feels like a month. The jet lag has hit me like a ton of bricks, and right when I need to be at my sharpest, I’m fuzzy and slow. Nonetheless, things couldn’t be better.
On our first day here we had a four-hour production meeting at XJTV. The Chief Engineer told us they had 65 people working on their live production, which makes me feel less guilty about importing my crew of 12. They are doing a three-hour live broadcast. They will start their show in Yiwu, then switch over to their studio when we need the gear at 3:00 UT….so their crew will run out of the production truck and ours will run in. For Totality, they will switch to a second site futher north at Altay. Our show ends at 4:30 UT, and they will switch back to Yiwu at 4:40 UT to interview our own Paul Doherty.
So this production will be a carefully coordinated dance between the Chinese crew and the Exploratorium crew. But we are trying to push the collaboration even further: we hope that one of their news anchors, Wendy Hsu, will produce three short segments for us (I can hear Rob now, “Wendy, back to you!”) The tricky part is the field set up.
The Chinese have spent $2million on a Solar Observation Platform out in the middle of the desert. It is a huge area with a small planetarium, exhibits, and a stage. They have lots of VIPs coming; party officials and big name scientists; for two-days of brouhaha. The Platform is separated from the Media Village by a 4-meter (13 foot) wall! Wendy will be on one side of the wall, we will be on the other. We only have two camera people (Lowell and myself), so who will run Wendy’s camera? We hope XJTV can help, but the camera operator won’t speak English, so cues will be tough.
We are going back to XJTV this afternoon. They are giving us one-time use rights to fabulous footage of the Xinjiang area, so we need to ‘make selects’ of the video. They are even going to edit it for us! (BTW: in exchange for all this help, XJTV gets use of our incredible telescope feeds.) We also need to work out some issues about our analog equipment signals getting coverted to digital ones, our NTSC getting converted for PAL uplink, end-to-end satellite test times, and scores of other little details.
WOW! It actually sounds like this is going to happen!
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