5/06/03 4am AT&T SMT; Licalsi and Rich exploring the upper views of Gotham from 88 Greenwich; LiCalsi and our food:







This is the Satellite Media Group studio, as I greeted it at 4a.m.

We had a start time of 6am and would finish around 1:30pm. In the interim, about 30 stations, from around the country, would interview our "talent" for 3-8 minutes each.

Our talent was a guy with the "hot electronics scoop" for the upcoming season. The trick, when I show up, is to guess who is really paying for the Satellite Media Tour. Sometimes it's obvious, like when the Muppet was on the air, promoting her new show. Or its new show. Or... whatever.

But today was one of those tricky ones. The talent was demoing a Panasonic DVD player, an AT&T cell phone pay-as-you-go plan, a couple of 3 megapixel cameras, and two webcams.

So, who was paying? This time it was AT&T, promoting their new pay-as-you-go plan. But they throw in all the other stuff to make the segment look like "authentic" and "helpful" information. DO NOT WATCH TELEVISION NEWS!!!!! IT IS ALL PAID FOR AND IT IS ALL SLANTED, EVEN THE INNOCUOUS STUFF!!!! AHHHHH!!!!!


That being said, here is a little tour of the studio:



This is Max. He's in the front row of the Control Room. He's one of my bosses, and he usually directs the Satellite Media Tours if the client doesn't want to direct them instead.




Here is a typical morning catering. DOUGHNUTS!!!! At 4am... they're either delicious or totally nauseating. Take your pick.




Some of the setup. I was on the camera that pretty much stayed on the talent. The other camera, operated by John, our lighting guy, moved around to different close ups of the items on the tables.




Here's "the client," or at least, one person from the company that hired us to do the Satellite Media Tour (SMT). Look at the items on the table. Typical TV business stuff.




This is the schedule, which gets distributed in the morning. As camera operator, I get a copy. It basically tells you how many more we have to do before we can go home and go back to sleep. It is especially hard operating the camera that doesn't move, because you literally do NOTHING most of the time, and it makes your body and brain think you're ready for alpha, theta, and omega waves. (Sleep.)




The teleprompters on the front of the cameras. We use them to show the talent who and where he is talking to at any given moment.




The talent in action. On the air. LIVE. We also do live to tape, which is where we do the segment as if it were live, but it is recorded by either the news affiliate or us, for playback at a later time (or multiple later times, as is the case on channels like Headline News, CNN, or Fox News National.)




There is usually a floor manager, whose job it is to let the talent know how much time there is left in the "window." The window is the time that is allotted to any one particular affiliate's interview.





I came home at 1:30pm, having had a full day of work, and I went to sleep. I woke up in the evening. LiCalsi came over to look at some footage of some movie on Richard's computer. Here he is, below, once again, enjoying our endless supply of food.






Richard wanted to show Peter the cool things we discovered when Richard and I were exploring the building a few nights ago. (When Richard's laundry got stolen and we were trying to find it in the dryer on another floor). This is a window bizarrely located in a stairwell on the 20th floor of the tower of our building. You get things like these in buildings made to be offices in the 1920's and converted to residential in the 1990's.



You can climb through the window, and you find yourself on the small roof of a small set-back. It's like a ledge. 20 stories up. Luckily, it has retaining walls, so it feels like a terrace, more than a ledge. It's very secret, and very private, and it has quite a north-looking view.




A shot of Peter with the beautifully streamlined art-deco tower of the Bank of New York building in the background... a favorite of many downtown New Yorkers, or people who know the building even exists. Its lobby consists entirely of a vaulted arched ceiling, covered with gold tile mosaic. I hope I get an excuse to go inside in the near future. It's on the famous corner of Broadway and Wall St.




Climbing 30 more stories, we are greeted with the same view, but higher up, and no ledge. Just Plexiglas.




The view from the 30th floor, in the stairwell. The bright area is the pit of the former World Trade Center. Or the "World Trade Center Site." Whatever you want to call it, there it is. West street is the string of bright yellow lights towards the left of the WTC. The geometric-shape-topped buildings to the right are the towers of the Wolrd Financial Center. The big black building in the foreground is the one that Richard and I have a view of from our 10th story apartment. It is still uninhabited after the disaster, as they are repairing the 15-story gash in its north side. The lights have been on, in the building, in the same pattern, every day since we moved in to our apartment and started looking. It's a bit eerie. It's the tallest building closest to the WTC site that still stands. The owners don't know if they are going to keep the building or demolish it. Being that it is an architectural black hole, I hope they take it down (SLOWLY) and put up something new.




Climbing even higher to the 37th floor, the stair case, and the windows, get very small. Here are Rich and Pete looking West towards their homeland: Jersey.




The view. The body of water is the Hudson. In the foreground are the taller buildings of Battery Park City. Bayonne (NJ) is immediately on the other side of the river, as is the continental United States. If New York City were to secede from the State of New York, and become Gotham State, would it be considered part of the 49 continental US states, or be grouped with Alaska and Hawaii as an island? :)




We came back down. Peter raided the fridge.