Coming Full Circle

This week I was so excited to be graphics producer. After an insanely exhilarating week as lead producer, I was ready for a break. However, this week being graphics producer proved to be just as stressful as any other week. I thought that I had learned everything that I needed to know as graphics producer the first time around but maybe because it was the first week there were a few things that I had completely forgotten about. For example, I did not know that it was my job to put the shells for the OTS graphics in iNEWS. My first week the art director had already done so which meant I was scrambling around 3:30pm to do so. I also realized how dependent we are on each other. I didn't have the cutlines from Shannon our lead producer until 3:30 or so which meant that graphics had a hectic afternoon. When we had the breaking news with Harrison Ford, I was scrambling to get my daily duties done as well as produce new graphics for this breaking news. 

Then, I took over for Elisabeth at 5:00pm which meant that I needed to make sure that all the videos were going to be complete for the show. As always, we had packages that weren't going to be done until moments before the show started and we had new breaking news video that needed to be edited. Luckily, our MJs pulled through more than ever and we had amazing reporters in the field to send us cell phone video from the scene of the crash. The final product ended up looking great but there was certaininly things we could do to make sure that it wasn't as hectic at the end of the day.

Finally, I learned that as graphics producer I really need to know what the video producer is doing - that's the most important part. There were times during the day that I didn't have anything to do so MJs would come up to me asking for stories to work on and I had no idea what Elisabeth had assigned and what still needed to be done. If she and I are in constant communication, then I can help her a little bit more with organization of things. We also really didn't get the chance to copy edit because of the fact that we were scrambling in the afternoon so if we had finished up some stories that could be done earlier in the day then it would have made everything so much easier. We could have made more calls for the Harrison Ford story and potentially could have had more information for the show. However, I thought we did the best we could with what we had and did an amazing show regardless!