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!
Urumqi, Jet Lag & The International Date Line
Posted by lowellr | Filed under Total Solar Eclipse: Live from China
Larry and I arrived in Urumqi early this morning. Airport to Airport it took us 24 hours (or maybe a bit longer). We left San Francisco on a Wednesday and arrived on a Friday (today). I’m told when we go back we will arrive only a few hours after we leave. Or, if we leave from further East ( like Beijing ) we would arrive even before we left. Confused, I sure am.
Tags: airport, jet lag, travel, urumqi
Is There a Wall in China?
Posted by robynh | Filed under Total Solar Eclipse: Live from China
It is a great privilege to be a producer for the Exploratorium. It is vital, of course, to go to potential webcast locations to meet officials and decide if the location is viable: Can the gear be shipped there safely? Is there a fast, reliable internet connection? Are there people there willing to help us?
I have been to China three times to arrange logistics, get permits, and establish partnerships for this webcast. Whenever I return from these trips my friends ask, “can I see your pictures?” I am probably the only American who has been to China, but has not seen the Great Wall. I have been to Beijing, but not seen the Forbidden Palace. I have been to Dunhuang, but not seen the Buddhist Caves. I have, however, seen the inside of a lot of conference rooms and I got to go behind-the-scenes at Xinjiang TV (which, for me, was really great.)
I did get one afternoon to stroll the streets of Urumqi. (I defended this luxury by explaining that I needed to buy local crafts to show at the Public Program at the Exploratorium) My first time in Urumqi (the capital of the Xinjiang Uygher Autonomous Region) I was flabbergasted: I expected a sleepy little town, but was met with an incredibly fashionable modern city. Anyway, I went to the Uygher neighborhood and was amazed! It was absolutely bustling! People smiling, vendors hawking in several languages, the evening call to prayer: it was a total delight. Here are a couple videos: one is of a quiet back street, the other is of a dumpling maker, who spoke several languages and spent some time in the U.S.
I ended up buying a dozen Uygher hats and 100 meters of traditional Xinjiang fabric! (I also bought a yurt, but that’s a whole other story…..) Our Executive Producer, Robert Semper, agreed to carry most of the fabric as I shopped.
Tags: silk route, solar eclipse, total solar eclipse, urumqi
