February 8, 2007
A wide-angle view of UWTV
The camera’s in tight; we’re watching a close-up shot.
The small black-and-white monitor on the back of the television camera shows the shot. It’s the youthful face of Dr. Paul Manner, an assistant professor of orthopedics and sports medicine.
Then the shot widens to show that an interview is about to begin. Manner and a guest sit at a table in front of a handsome background of muted shades of brown, a replica of the human hip bone on the table between them.
This is a taping of UWTV’s program Talk Medicine, and Manner is discussing hip replacement surgery with Janice Isner, a former patient who agreed to share the story in the name of helping others better understand the surgery. Manner receives a word of direction from producer-director Terry Simpson, and the taping begins.
Zoom back a bit more, and we see the darkened studio, the smallish stage at its center, the director and others hovering just out of the light. To watch this, one of a host of programs UWTV produces with UW Medicine and other campus clients, is to be reminded how much university television has matured over the years. Gone are the clichés of older days — thin scenery prone to wobbling; flat, stark lighting; glazed-looking speakers; and always the same dusty potted plant in the background.
Rather, UWTV is a crisply professional organization, ready to serve the UW community in an ever-increasing variety of ways, including live and taped broadcasts, Webcasts, video conferencing, video on demand and full-service writing, editing and production.
Times change. The Internet recast the rules and threw open the door to virtually instant, worldwide online communications, of which UWTV takes ever-greater advantage. Jack Hoffman, UWTV’s production manager, who has worked in television for many years and at the UW for four, takes pride in what UWTV has to offer.
“Not many universities can boast of having their own 24/7 television station that’s available in over 11 million homes nationally,” Hoffman says. “Or a Web site that hosts over a thousand on-demand videos. Or an award-winning production team that produces television programs, live Webcasts, videoconferences, DVDs and online videos. But that’s exactly what we have at the UW.”
What’s on the screen is just a fraction of UWTV’s total scope. We see more as we pull back — impossibly in real life — from the studio and its control room, past the station’s four “editing suites” furnished with state-of-the-industry digital equipment. Along the way we glimpse the master control room, staffed all day every day by technicians who monitor the ongoing broadcasts. There, the current UWTV program shows on one screen, Research Channel on the other and a NASA broadcast shows on UWTV2, the station’s alternate channel.
The production unit of UWTV, Hoffman explains, has 10 full-time producers, directors, editors, technical and administrative staff, with another three dozen or so camera operators, audio engineers and crew available part-time. “At times it’s so busy we’ll have 30 productions in various phases at the same time,” Hoffman says.
Far from being just a broadcasting house, UWTV is ready to help UW offices and departments create their video, broadcast or Web message from the brainstorming stage through writing and full production. “It’s not the same business model as a commercial station,” Hoffman says, “We work on projects that are important to the schools and departments of the University, not what we think will sell to advertisers.”
That structure also enables the station to customize its work to the campus client’s exact needs. “For each campus department we really look at what their outreach goals are and then see what technological tools we have that would match that outreach,” says Christine Ruiz, UWTV producer and director. That could be a straight-up TV production, but often also includes the creation and distribution of DVDs and encoding files to be used as streaming video, either from the UWTV Web site or the site of the client department.
One such client is the UW College of Forest Resources. As the Creating Futures fundraising campaign came near, “it became evident that we needed to do something to get the word out more effectively,” says Thomas Mentele, the college’s director of development. “The airwaves were dominated by kind of a negative slant on forestry and forest resources, and yet we were doing really great work and our faculty were highly acclaimed and our alumni were out there changing the world…. We needed to expand our footprint, on and off campus.”
The college sought partners on campus, Mentele says, and found the Alumni Association and UWTV — both relationships that have remained strong. “And a lecture series was brought to life — the Denman Forestry Issues Series — and what they’ve become is an integral partner in our public-private partnership to … engage the public on issues involving natural resources and forest resources.”
In keeping with UWTV’s all-service approach, station producers worked with the college to shape the lecture series collaboratively. “They suggested a format, they had chosen a venue, and they have a very hands-on crew that are easy to get professional results from.” Mentele says, adding that Ruiz’s help was extraordinary. “You couldn’t hire a media firm to do what they do — it’d cost a ton of money.”
Summing up, he says, “It’s been excellent — we’ve been able to talk about our mission and our vision and values, and frame that up before the viewer sees the lecture series.”
Charlie Hinckley, a producer/writer at UWTV, stresses the station staff’s ability to customize the product for its campus clients’ needs from the idea stage on up. “You can come to us with more nebulous things — concepts you haven’t clarified yet — or you can come to us with something that’s very concrete. And we can work with that.”
The widest possible shot of UWTV, then, would reveal its vast and growing audience, both on television and online. Where university television stations of the past hoped to broadcast regionally at best, Webcasting and other new media now make that audience global.
Despite that epic scope of delivery, the essence of television and video still grows from the relationship between the camera and its subject. And in many cases, that starts in the studio. Zoom back quickly to the campus then, to Kane Hall, past editing suites and the perpetually-staffed control room, to where Dr. Manner and his patient wind up their taped interview for Talk Medicine.
Manner gives the process a good review. “They had rehearsed, and I had a reasonable idea of what I was going to talk about,” he says. “It was fun to do, but I won’t quit my day job.”
UWTV is on Channel 27 on most Puget Sound-area cable systems, and at www.uwtv.org online. To learn more about UWTV’s production team has to offer, visit online at www.uwtvproduction.org/.
