Dear Friends, I have 216 people on this email list, and others in several chat groups, waiting to be notified of new installments of my interview show. Often, people ask when new ones will air. Here's the story: I have been taping new ones almost every week and have done 10 of them so far. They haven't aired on our Fairfield Public Access TV station (FPAC) or on YouTube because they all require some post-production work. Opening and closing titles need to be added, and in cases where we recorded on 1-hour DVDs (instead of 2-hour ones), the segments need to be spliced together. The person with the equipment and ability to do this is Bryan Hawthorne, the hard-working young man running FPAC. Bryan works 40+ hours a week and is paid $500 a month, so what he does is very much a labor of love. He is enthusiastic about my project, but he has a lot of demands on his time and always has software and equipment problems to deal with, due to FPAC's very limited budget. The editing software he needs is installed on an inadequate computer, and his occasional IT guy hasn't gotten around to moving it to a better one. He recently build FPAC's website <http://fairfieldpublicaccess.net/> , and as an example of all he's asked to do, the hospital called him last week and told him that a patient who shouldn't leave was threatening to do so in order to watch the high school wrestling match, which he hadn't missed in decades. So Bryan taped it and delivered a DVD to the hospital. Great guy! At every stage of this project, what I initially saw as an obstacle has turned out to be an opportunity. Initially, I conceived this as a radio show on our local low-power FM station. The video you see at http://www.youtube.com/user/buddhaatthegaspump was a pilot for that. (Audio quality is poor because we had to use the camera's internal mic, but we've used lapel mics for subsequent interviews, so they'll be much easier to listen to.) When the radio station decided not to do the show, I saw that as an obstacle I needed to overcome, but I finally realized that FPAC is a much better arrangement. I don't have to do station ID's every ten minutes, show length is flexible (I can go as long as two hours if I want to), I tape the show at a convenient time, and I don't have to set up a camera at the radio station every week. Instead, we're in a semi-professional TV studio with proper lighting, a green screen behind us (the green is replaced with whatever backdrop we want), and eventually, three cameras. I've been able to relax and talk with my guests from a much more intuitive level. Then, of course, I've regarded as another obstacle the delay in getting DVDs ready to air and upload. I might have been able to pressure Bryan into cobbling together crumby-looking versions of the show, but he has high standards. He wants channel surfers to stop and say, "Whoa, that was produced on public access?!" He told me last week that public access TV stations syndicate content to one another, and that if our production is good enough, it may be picked up by stations around the country. He also said that commercial networks keep an eye on the public access stations, looking for ideas for their own programming. So all is well and wisely put, I'm having a blast taping new shows weekly, and when the time is right, they'll start to air locally, I'll upload them to YouTube, and I'll notify you. In the meanwhile, there's a very active chat group <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BuddhaAtTheGasPump> which you might like to join (note the Photoshop work by yours truly), and you might consider subscribing to the YouTube channel <http://www.youtube.com/user/buddhaatthegaspump> . If I get enough subscribers and views, YouTube will let me upload shows in their entirety, rather than in 10-minute segments. So BatGap (get the acronym?) is alive and well. Thanks for your patience and stay tuned! Regards, Rick P.S. Bryan is looking for a part-time job. If you're in Fairfield and have something to offer him, or if you live elsewhere and have work that might match his skills that he can do from here, please let me know.
Do the next obvious thing.
Rick Archer
President
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