Travel Essentials for a TV Producer

Since E:60 launched back in the fall of 2007, my assignments have taken me to many locales throughout the United States, including California, New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, Florida, Minnesota, South Dakota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.  International destinations have included England, Iceland, Germany, Italy and South Africa. 

No matter where E:60 assignments take me, there is always an essential “go bag” of things I like to have with me to make my travels more productive and more comfortable.

Some of the tools of the trade are obvious: passport, money, laptop computer, etc.  But some items are less obvious and good to have whether you are producing a TV segment or just traveling leisurely on vacation. They include sunscreen and all-weather gear (I’m often shooting outdoors at all times of the year in many different climates) and it can be extremely hot and sunny in places like Florida and Nevada, and incredibly cold (Iceland) or wet (Britain). Having the proper protection from the elements are essential.

Also essential are comfortable and appropriate footwear.  As a TV producer, a lot of time is spent standing on your feet, and traveling on all types of surfaces.  A comfortable pair of sneakers are great if you are working on a basketball court, but I have a great pair of trekking shoes that provided the best traction in the Italian Alps.

When traveling to more remotes places like South Africa or even rural areas in the U.S. , having bottled water, toilet paper, and over-the-counter medications for to prevent or cure contaminated water, or bad food can keep you on schedule.

But believe it or not, I think the two most important items that I never travel without these days is an HD pocket video camera and a really good pair of noise cancelling headphones.  At E:60, we pride ourselves on production value, and whether capturing another angle, or saving costs by using a small inexpensive HD video camera instead of hiring a full crew, today’s technology has allowed producers a great deal more flexibility and opportunity to get more high quality footage for less. They are great for grabbing photos for producer blogs, too. 

Similarly, whether trying to be productive on an airplane, or trying to access the quality of the sound during an interview, and just need quiet while screening footage in a noisy room in Bristol, a quality pair of noise-canceling headphones can be a game changer. Noise-cancelling technology allows me to focus on the task at hand without being distracted by the person next to me, or the crowd at a noisy sporting event.     

T. Sean Herbert

E:60 Feature Producer

E:60 Josiah from E60 on Vimeo.

Airing on the season finale. Tuesday, November 9th at 7 pm ET on ESPN.

E:60 Roberta Mancino teaser from E60 on Vimeo.

Airing on the season finale. Tuesday November 9th @ 7pm ET on ESPN.

E:60 Bhopal Trailer from E60 on Vimeo.
Airing on the E:60 season Finale. Tuesday, Nov. 9th @ 7pm ET on ESPN.

Two Traditions

Middlebury College of Vermont celebrates a precarious tradition.

Fifty years ago a Middlebury athlete escorted Butch Varno to a football game for the first time. Varno, then a young teen, was disabled by cerebral palsy and could not attend on his own. Now in his 60s, Varno continues to attend Middlebury football and basketball games, escorted by generation after generation of varsity athletes in a ritual of compassion and love.

Senior Producer Ben Houser wondered how to do visual justice to the tradition. How to convey its timeless values? How to convey its inherent fragility?

On a drive through Vermont, Houser and his wife stopped at an antique shop. They spotted an old film camera, a Keystone 8mm, made in the late 1930s by a now-defunct Boston company. An idea took shape.

“No real film existed from the 60s. I thought, if I can shoot something in old film, and something in HD, and place the two next to each other, it would give a sense of the passage of time, visually,” Houser recalled.

Houser bought the Keystone. Film for it no longer is made, but he found a hobbyist in California who owned an old supply of ASA 50 color film – tiny spools in a metal disk. The Keystone has settings from ASA 10 to ASA 40. He bought five rolls of the ASA 50 color.

“Those old cameras don’t have iris control (which regulates light), so you hit-and-run and you get whatever image you get,” Houser said. “I got the ASA 50 knowing I could fix a little of the brightness or darkness in post-edit.”

Wielding the Keystone, Houser and production assistant Megan Anderson shot the nursing home where Varno lives, a campus archway, and the football field.

“It was hard – I had never used anything like that before,” Anderson said. “Luckily I had a cameraman – Jim Greico – who knew how to work with it.

“Each roll of film was only about eight minutes, and you had to crank the camera, and it would only roll for seven or eight minutes. So you roll, and crank it, and then roll and crank it again. You were constantly getting one shot and stopping and trying to reset.”

At a climactic moment honoring Varno at Middlebury’s homecoming ceremony, film ran out.

“It’s not something you can easily replace,” Anderson said. “You have to go somewhere out of direct sunlight and reload and re-string it through – it took like 15 minutes.”

Developing the film was the next hurdle – and not a small one.

“Old 8mm has two sides to it – when you run it through the first time, you take it out of the spool on the bottom and put it back at the top and run it through again,” Houser said. “Because if you think of an old film strip, think of two images next to each other, and that’s what old 8mm is.

“We had to find a guy who could take that film, split it down the middle, so now there’s two separate rolls. The rolls are 25 feet long, so you get 50 feet out of it because it runs through twice.”

Houser found a small studio in Seattle that pulled off the feat. The developed film then was sent to a New York studio, where the images were transferred onto digital beta tape. With that, Houser completed the journey by converting the digital beta into the 4x3 HD format used by E:60.



“It took five states – Vermont, California, Washington, New York, and Connecticut – to get 10 shots,” Houser said.

He thinks it was worth the effort. The new ‘old’ film will augment two authentic shots from that era culled from a Middlebury College promotional reel.

“Artistically it made a lot of sense because this is a 50-year-old tradition,” Houser said. “It shows you what it would have looked like in 1960 if he (Varno) had walked on the field, versus today when you see the pretty HD and slo-mo cameras.

For Anderson, the Keystone connected her to her own tradition of film technology. She said it heightened her empathy for producers of that era.

“It made me realize how lucky we are that it’s so easy and how hard it must have been for them,” she said. “It made me feel sorry for them.”



posted by Steve Marantz, November 3, 2010

The Shower Scene

Film fans of a certain age have ‘Dr. No’, when Ursula Andress emerges from tropical surf, bikini-clad as Honey Ryder, to the delight of Sean Connery’s James Bond.

Football fans now have E:60’s shower shot – 25 seconds of water pouring over the bare torso of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ running back Maurice Jones-Drew.

“Unique and different,” producer David Salerno said.

It was conceived at an initial interview, in Jacksonville, in which Jones-Drew talked about his late grandfather, Maurice Jones. He told Salerno and reporter Lisa Salters that his mental preparation for games involved relaxing under a shower and thinking about his grandfather.

“We’ve got to shoot that,” Salters said.

Jones-Drew consented. The shot took place in the locker room at De La Salle High School, Concord, Calif., where he starred early in the decade, known then as Maurice Drew.

Some viewers will be disappointed to learn that Jones-Drew stripped only to his shorts.

“We had the shower lit, and had one mini camera, and one Varicam to shoot the 60p slow-mo stuff,” Salerno said.

Salerno had Jones-Drew strike several poses – head down, hands in front of chest, hands pressed against the wall – as water sprayed and tumbled over him.

Over the sensual imagery Salerno laid Jones-Drew’s voice, “There is one thing I do the night before a game...turn on the shower and turn the lights off...put my head down and try to relax...and the only thing I think about is him, man, and everything he done for me...”

Salerno led with the shower shot. It was a triumph of access, but that was not Salerno’s first consideration.

“It was more of an artistic thing,” Salerno said. “The dim lighting and the moodiness – you don’t see it that often in stories about athletes.”



posted by Steve Marantz, October 26, 2010

From Finish to Start

Newton Marshall’s journey took him from Jamaica to Alaska, from reggae to frostbite, from obscurity to E:60.

         Producer Mike John’s journey was the opposite – minus the obscurity.

         “Mush Mon” is the story of the first Jamaican to pilot a dogsled in the Iditarod, the 1000-mile Anchorage to Nome race.  It is a light-hearted story, a variation on ‘Cool Runnings’, about the Jamaican bobsled team of 1988, and as inspirational.

         To tell it, Johns and reporter Seth Wickersham, a native of Alaska, started near Fairbanks, where the 27-year-old Marshall trained last February.

         “You think of him going from Jamaica to Alaska, but we did the main interview in Alaska and the follow-up in Jamaica,” Johns said.

         Johns shot Marshall on a rural expanse owned by Lance Mackey, the four-time Iditarod champion who was hired by sponsor Jimmy Buffett to teach Marshall the ropes. The weather was milder than expected.

         “Zero degrees,” said Johns.

         To shoot Marshall on his dogsled, Johns put a camera in a sled towed by an all-terrain vehicle.  But when the ATV braked, the sled kept on going.  Wipeout.

         Minus a smashed camera battery, Johns soldiered on.  He shifted from an outdoor shoot to a heated indoor location.  Oops.  His cameras fogged up from condensation.

         “They needed at least 45 minutes to warm up,” Johns recalled.

         The crew flipped on the light switches in Marshall’s cabin, adjacent to Mackey’s house.  No light.  Broken generator.

         They used natural light from a window.

         “Given the humble nature of the cabin that kind of limited lighting worked,” Johns said.

         Marshall, raised in poverty with little education, proved to be a strong character, after he overcame his initial shyness.

         “Our first day around him I was a little concerned that he wasn’t going to be as expressive as you would like to tell his own story,” Johns said. “But this was a kid stuck in a cabin in Alaska for four months – after a couple of days with him – in some ways he was anxious to talk to people.  Once we sat him down we couldn’t shut him up.”

         When the race began early in March, Johns was gone.  Footage from the race and interviews at four checkpoints came from Iditarod organizers. 

         Johns finished in Jamaica, where it had begun for Marshall.   He shot the back-story about how Marshall came to be in the race, as well as Marshall’s reflections on his 12-day mush and 47^th place finish.

         In the telling Johns and Wickersham managed a bit of story magic.  Marshall had related that at his lowest point, in the second week, he had sung to himself – a popular Jamaican tune.  Wickersham asked him to sing it for the E:60 camera. 

         Marshall offered up his front porch version of “All Will Be Fine”, by Buju Banton.  Johns transitioned from Marshall’s song, at the Jamaican location, to the Buju Banton studio version, over a shot of Marshall guiding his team across a frozen trail.  

         Johns called it “a device for emotional resonance.”  He could have said it was a device to tug at the heartstrings, or to make the spirit soar.   In the end, “Mush Mon” did both.

posted by Steve Marantz, October 22, 2010