All I Ever Really Needed to Know about Show Producing... I Learned From Sesame Street

I remember having a discussion with a former boss of mine. I said something like, "Viewers began to have a shorter attention span with the advent of MTV. " The boss disagreed said it started much earlier, with Sesame Street. Watch the program and you'll see what he means. Each segment is fairly brief and when they switch segments, you see something totally different.

When I got my first show, another producer gave me some advice, "You just want each story to look a little different from the last one, so change it up a little bit each time. But of course, you already know all this." I had no idea.

Following his advice, here's what the top of each story in a first block might look like:

Lead.
2-shot (one anchor reads one graph)
Take Single Cam (other anchor reads one graph)
Toss double box to live reporter (one graph).

2nd story.
Ots

3rd story
Cam

4th Story
2-shot

5th Story
Chroma
((I throw the chroma in because no matter how small your market is, everybody has a chroma key. You may not have a flat screen monitor or video wall, but you have graphics make a chroma and voila- you have a new place to put your anchors or reporter. Make the chroma generic like "Tonight at Ten" or whatever and you can use it over and over.))

You get the idea. Play with it. There are no hard fast rules except keep it interesting.

Also, change it up in terms of visual elements. This helps with pacing. If you've had a couple vo's, throw in some sound or NATS full just to break it up. Toss an interesting vo or vosot between two pkgs. Again, no hard rules, but try to think about the overall packaging of your show in addition to the content. I like to pick a show I enjoyed watching and then steal ideas. Fox Report on the Fox News Channel has some of the best pacing on t.v. right now. But I may not be completely be unbiased.