Advanced broadcasting students get real world experience filming school board meetings

It's Monday night. It's showtime. And Jon Henson is calling the shots.

The Cape Girardeau Central High School senior is a veteran director in Cape Girardeau Career and Technology Center's broadcast production class. Henson is beyond basic broadcast, where aspiring broadcasters cut their teeth behind the cameras. He's in the advanced class, and this night he's leading a crew of six involved in the complex art of video production -- charged with recording the Cape Girardeau School Board meeting that will run on digital cable channel 989.

It can be a pressure cooker in the mobile production van, the nerve center of the operation, as the multiple monitors display the shots from the three manned cameras and the stationary set positioned around the school board chamber.

"It's really hard. You have to make sure everyone else is paying attention," Henson said. "Sometimes students mess up. But we tend to learn on our mess-ups."

On this night, Henson's second stint directing the school board meeting, the crew opens with a wide shot of the board, mixing in some shots of the audience. Henson calls for close-ups of the speakers and, to vary the action, for the camera operators to cut to some shots of a board member listening, maybe reading documents. When it's all over, the cameras move back to an open shot. And then, fade to black.

For Henson, running the show is all about seeing things from a different point of view.

"Whenever you're directing it's like you are a viewer yourself, yet you're creating what you are viewing," he said.

Working one of the cameras is Justin Day, a junior at Central with a dream to be a sportscaster, or an ESPN radio talk show host. He said working the camera gives him an idea of what a live show would feel like. He likes the intensity, but he said it's hard on the knees.

"You have to be quick," Day said. "It's kind of hectic at some points, like when they're going back and forth on another topic."

Harley Criddle, a junior at Delta High School, prefers working the camera for high school football games. There's much more action. But Criddle, who also wants to work in the broadcast field some day, said she's learned something important during her video work at the school board meetings.

"You really don't think about what it takes to run a school," she said. "I don't think most teens know that."

mkittle@semissourian.com

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