Office:

Rocket Hall Television Studio
Room 1958

Live Production

In addition to directing closed circuit television production of UT home football games for both the 2002 and 2003 seasons, during the fall of 2003 John directed two UT road games televised on Buckeye Cable’s TV-5 WB from Central Michigan University and Ball State University. Prior to the creation of the Buckeye Cable Sports Network in the winter of 2003, he also traveled with the remote truck each Friday for Buckeye Cable’s high school football and basketball productions, for which he served as EIC and trained students on Audio and Camera. He has also produced and directed the live video production of UT's Songfest in 2003, 2004, and 2005.

Since the Department of Communication took over management and programming responsibilities for UT's closed circuit information channel 31 beginning in January 2004, John has been helping supervise the twice-weekly production of the Rocket Report newscast, which is produced by Communication students enrolled in the Broadcast Journalism Comm-4900 class taught by Dr. Jackie Layng. John serves as technical supervisor and graphics coordinator for the 15-minute news program, which is taped on Tuesday and Friday mornings and airs throughout the week on campus.

With the arrival of Buckeye Cable System's BCSN local sports network in early 2004, which is producing many of the events formerly done by the UT Communication Department's mobile production truck, the department's responsibilities have shifted away from remote high school and UT sports production to more events recorded in the Department of Communication's studio. John is currently serving as director and crew chief for BCSN Sports Rap, a show produced in the UT Studio by Communication Department staff and students for the BCSN sports channel. The Sports Rap show is recorded twice weekly and airs throughout the week on BCSN.

During the winter and spring of 2003, John completed work rewiring the video portion of the equipment racks in the television control room. All of the old video cables were replaced with new color-coded coax lines which John hand-crimped, also installing two video patch panels to provide greater flexibility in studio productions. In the Spring of 2003, the department took receipt of a new news set, generously donated by WTVG-13 ABC.
Over the summer of 2003, John and his colleagues Don Reiber and Tom Osswald dismantled the old production set in the studio, reconfigured it at the opposite corner of the studio, and rebuilt the new set from Channel 13, giving students two sets to work with.

Early in the summer of 2003, John and Don began the task of rebuilding a large portion of the consoles in the remote production truck in order to create a separate room for audio, and a new desk for the truck’s Chyron. At the same time that they were physically rebuilding a great deal of the structure inside the truck, John and Don also replaced most of the video wiring, allowing the installation of a number of new video monitors at the director’s console.
At the same time, John undertook the arduous task of rewiring all of the truck’s audio. All of the old audio lines running from the rear of the truck to the audio console were removed, and new audio snakes were installed, providing a total of 64 audio lines between the back of the truck and two new patch panels in the audio rack. During the project, the department decided to purchase a new Soundcraft Series 2 24-channel audio console, which John installed and wired into the patch panels just in time for the start of football season.

Through the spring of 2004, John worked on installing new audio wiring in the TV studio control room, working around the many ongoing productions. All of the old audio lines in the video tape equipment racks were removed one-by-one and replaced with new permanent color-coded stereo pair audio lines that were wired into a set of patchbays in the engineering area. Multi-channel audio snakes were installed under the control room floor to connect the patch panels in video tape with two new 96-crosspoint patch panels that would be installed in the audio control room over the summer when the studio was not in use.
Over the summer months, John completed the audio rewiring project in the control room, installing a new Soundcraft Series 2 audio console, wiring the patch panels, and installing new racks and furniture. He custom built all of the audio cables himself, including nearly a dozen 8-channel audio snakes in various connector combinations that were installed running from the console to the punch block connections under the floor for the patch panels. As part of the project in the audio control area, he also installed a digicart audio playback & storage unit, and multiple LCD camera and program monitors above the audio console.

Over the summer of 2004 he also worked with the communication department's Dr. Jackie Layng to design a new interview set, which he built with the help of two students, Mike Thompson, and Mike McKeivier. The old fabric flats were reupholstered while John designed and bulit new wood flats for the set, which he and Thompson assembled and which Thompson and McKeivier painted. John also installed new carpeting on the stage riser and ran audio and video wiring underneath the stage for later use. After the flats were primed and painted, John built the truss structure that would hold the flats off of the wall to allow access behind the set, and then he, Thomposon, and McKeivier hung the flats over the course of a couple of days. After he attached and painted the trim and wainscoting on the flats, the entire set was completed just in time for the start of fall semester.

As part of the studio renovation project, the communication department also decided to purchase 2 new pneumatic studio camera pedestals and fluid heads from Cartoni. The pedestals were set up in the studio and two of the new Hitachi Z-3000 cameras that had formerly been used on the remote truck were moved into the studio and installed on the pedestals to provide an increased image quality from the previous Hitachi Z-One cameras.

In January 2005, the department added a third Z-3000 camera and another Cartoni studio pedestal to the television studio, bringing the total number of cameras to four, including 3 on studio pedestals with teleprompters and a single Hitachi Z-One camera on a jib-mount. The additional new studio camera, which John assembeled and installed, allows more flexibility in live productions, enabling more than one set to be used at once.