Students in Professor Sarah Menke-Fish’s TV Studio Production class will soon have their work aired on the NBC4 website and an NBC channel in early January.
Students in the class have been working to develop a 16-episode show called “Operation W.A.T.E.R.,” which covers environmental and health problems associated with water, according to Quinn Keating, a senior in the School of Communication.
“It took a few weeks for us to decide on this show,” Keating said. “The idea had to be strong enough for us to get 16 episodes out of it, and it had to focus on water.”
The students were given water as their topic due to SOC’s water awareness initiative, according to Keating. A group of SOC professors began to incorporate water issues into their courses to improve understanding of the topic this fall, according to the website.
The SOC-NBC partnership began five years ago when Menke-Fish was approached by the network. Since 2009, each section of this class has been able to publicly broadcast their work.
“I had submitted one of the shows that our students were producing at the time, and they were very interested,” Menke-Fish said.
Episodes from 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 are available online.
Every student in the class is involved in the production of each episode of the show. Each week, one student in the class becomes the “talent” of the show, in which that student is responsible for coming up with that week’s topic.
“Each week requires a different level of involvement from each student because of our rotating jobs,” Keating said in an email. “We always try to perform our job as best we can, but some jobs require a little more effort than others.”
Each episode has an in-studio and out-of-studio component.
In the last week of November, the episode focused on oil pollution in water. SOC senior Sara Schillaci and that week’s “talent” performed an out-of-studio component in front of the Potomac River, explaining the issue and the relevance of the issue to the area.
Schillaci’s in-studio component involved showing the effects of oil pollution in water. Using the studio, Schillaci and her classmates created a pseudo laboratory to conduct an experiment.
Most in studio components involve an experiment, game show or interview, according to Keating.
Aside from the “talent,” Keating said the other rotating in-studio roles include cameras, floor manager and technical director among others.
“By the end of this course, each student should have a working knowledge of every component of the television studio,” Menke-Fish said.
Episodes of “Operation W.A.T.E.R.” will be available to the public on the NBC4 website and on the non-stop NBC channel in early January.
“We have put a lot of work into this series and it is nice to know that we are working to create a quality show that will be viewed by the public, rather than just graded by our professor,” Keating said.
