Biography of a G-Man

In 6th grade I joined the AV Club's modern equivalent–our school's TV news show. Once a week broadcasted live to the school over an internal TV channel with news and features about classes and student activities. At first I watched from the control room, but eventually they let me work the sound board, monitoring the levels of the mics and video feeds. One day the video editor didn't show, so I was put to the Panasonic video board. Eventually I did more and, by year's end, I was familiar with all backstage aspects of the show.

I was not very involved with the show in 7th grade because I was busy playing with computers and making stop-motion movies in art class. But, in my final year of middle school, I lived in the video editing room for several hours a day. I skipped classes, worked after school, and came in on weekends. After an incident where, during a live broadcast, footage of one of the school's poorly kept bathrooms was aired, all shows had to be pretaped and screened. This meant I had to take the individual show segments and glue them together before broadcast, requiring many hours of my time each week.

Putting the shows together was no easy task. Something I required complicated setups to achieve the desired results. Consequently, I was often rewiring the connections between the three VCRs, three TVs, two editing boards, the text display unit, and the sound board. This pissed off everyone.

The other students were already confused or inept, so my constant tweaking tweaked them. The public access channel's techs would occasionally `help' us by rewiring the studio, destroying my productivity. And our teacher, who was usually teaching her other class while we worked, took out her frustration with her inability on my rewiring efforts. Yet, I was the only person using the video editing equipment on a regular basis and anyone else who wanted to use it had to ask me for help even when I hadn't rewired the studio.

By the end of the year, I was tired of the politics and linear video editing, so I gave it up and moved on to other interests.