B-CC TV SEASON 2
Project Type: School/Personal
Position: Lead Editor
Timeline: May 2017 - May 2018
Programs Used: Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition, Final Cut Pro
B-CC TV is a weekly 10-15 minute YouTube show produced by the students of Bethesda Chevy Chase High School. I was the lead editor for the second season, meaning I was in charge of the show's editors and it was my job to make the final cuts of each episode. The show consists of school news intercut with various segments. The segments can be about anything, from a PSA about a new class to a wacky video of an anchor walking around and asking students weird questions at lunch. This was only the second season it had existed and the show was still very new.
B-CC TV is probably the single most important experience I've had so far in TV. First of all it showed me that I wanted to do something Television related as a career while I was struggling to find out what to do with my life. Secondly, it taught me so many lessons about working with other people, communication, my limits, and delegating tasks.
The main goal of Season 2 was to up the overall quality of the show, make the quality of the show more consistent, and establish a tone and style for the show that would persist for the coming years. And on the most basic level, establish the show as something permanent and not a one year gimmick, or simply, to just not let the show crash and burn before the third season. All things considered I think we met those goals and the show is now pretty ingrained at the school. At the time of writing this the show is headed into its fourth season and can hopefully go strong for years to come. (UPDATE: In the summer of 2020, the show won 4 Capital Emmy Awards, so it's safe to say things are still trending in the right direction)
WHY DOES IT EXIST?
Understanding why B-CC TV exists is just as important as understanding what it is. B-CC TV is extremely new, as I'm writing this it's going into its fourth season. It's the successor to the previous morning show, Wake Up B-CC, which wound up being such a dumpster fire it got canceled. The show was live instead of pre-recorded and every morning instead of once a week.
A number of factors contributed to the collapse of Wake Up B-CC, the first is that over time the class was seen as a joke class, that many people would register for and just skip every day, so they were always understaffed. Secondly, the show was plagued by terrible audio and video issues, I'd say about 40% of the episodes I saw were totally unwatchable. Third, there's just not enough that goes on at a suburban Maryland High School to fill 5 shows a week. Fourth, the live streaming equipment was a tad dated and whatever basic character generator they were using was beyond awful (the cameras were fine though). And finally, and most importantly, the internet couldn't handle it. The show was canceled at the end of 2014, a few years before the school would upgrade to high speed internet. Basically, it didn't matter how bad the video and audio issues were, or how uninspired the show was, because most of the time we couldn't watch it. The highest resolution the school's bandwidth could handle was 360p, and even with every classroom trying to stream it in 360p, it would still crash the school's internet frequently.
The Wake Up B-CC livestream.com page was actually still up as of about a year ago, but alas, it finally went down recently. All that remains now is a long dead twitter page.
After it got canceled, a few students and Ms. Pagán (an English teacher) came together to attempt to revive the show as a weekly YouTube series that was more in tune with the thoughts of the students, the idea was approved and became B-CC TV. The first season of the show was a success and the show was allowed to stay, I came in at the very end of the first season.
WHAT DID I DO?
As described in the paragraph at the top of the page, I was a lead editor. My job was to basically run the production of every single episode from a technical standpoint. I coordinated all the other editors, and was in charge of putting the final cut of each episode together. This meant that I had to edit the anchors and sports every week, as well as putting in all the segments that were submitted into the final product, exporting that product, getting it up on YouTube, and I was the only one that knew how to use the Adobe Suite, so I would also design and implement all of the motion graphics on the show, and I created the intro and the credits.
I had to constantly keep tabs on all aspects of what was going on with the episode and who was doing what, because losing a single segment to a miscommunication or other error would make things exponentially harder come editing day. I also had to sometimes make changes to segments that didn't work or cut them entirely if they were too bad to go on the show. Basically, my level of control over what the final cut was second only to the Director Ms. Pagán. I'd frequently have to re-edit and change things within the segments and the episode as a whole, as well as act on feedback from both Ms. Pagán and other members of the group.
Since I was the one that executed all the changes in the master cut of each episode, that meant that I was almost always one of the first to arrive, and one of the last to leave. I believe I only missed or left early two editing days out of the entire year. I wish I could've delegated the task of making changes to someone else, but I was much faster and more knowledgeable about the editing programs than any of the editors on the show at the time.
Of course, I didn't just work on the final cut of the episode all week. I was also involved in the production of many segments. I edited quite a few segments myself throughout the year, came up with the ideas for a few, went on many shoots, appeared sporadically in the background of the show, did voice overs for some PSA's, and even got to write, produce, and host my own segment on the history of the school.
The only thing I really didn't have much control over was what segments went on the show (because that's up to the anchors themselves) and the quality of most of the segments that got handed in, since I didn't film or edit most of the individual segments themselves. I'd step in occasionally if a segment was truly broken, but there weren't enough hours in the day for me to step into the creative process for every single segment, or for me to fix every subpar segment with issues (and some weren't even salvageable to begin with). I learned over the course of the year to pick my battles, and that sometimes getting the final episode out is more important than trying to have every segment be perfect. As pessimistic as it sounds, learning to live with and put out episodes with segments that weren't up to my personal standards for quality is a big lesson I learned.
Basically the show lived and died by my hands, for better or for worse. Some of our episodes and many of our segments weren't exactly great, but hopefully the context from the rest of this article answers the reason why. I was also king of tech support, and had to fix issues with anything and everything that went wrong. I think I probably saved something like 3-5 episodes that didn't export properly the morning the show aired before first period.
Unfortunately, It's impossible for me to point out and list every single thing I touched throughout the Season, because I was at least a little bit involved with everything (so it would be an extremely long list) but for fun Here's the first segment I ever made for the Season 2 Pilot.
Also, I wasn't exactly trying to keep records of all my work then, there was no voice in my head at the time saying: "You're going to need to write about this in detail on a portfolio website someday in the distant future".
ANATOMY OF AN EPISODE
I'm going to attempt to describe what the basic structure of a B-CC TV episode is. The show starts with a cold open with the two anchors, followed by the intro, we then return to the desk and the anchors break down a mix of national, local, and school news. Periodically, they toss to a segment. A segment is a 1-3 minute video that can be about anything, a PSA for a class or event coming up, an informative segment about something interesting or something completely out there and ridiculous. The only common theme is that they were obviously all school related in some way, and we tried to interact with the rest of the students as much as possible. Probably our funniest and most well received recurring segment consisted purely of Granger walking through the hallways at lunch and interacting with people. Segments depend mostly on what anchors want to do and while we did have a loose schedule in Season 2, aside from a few exceptions it was nearly impossible to have a consistent schedule for segment releases. There're two to three segments during the episode before the anchors toss to the only segment that appears every week, the sports segment, where a sports anchor breaks down the recent results and upcoming events for B-CC sports teams. After the sports segment the anchors wrap up the episodes and we roll the credits. Episodes are usually 10-15 minutes long.
THE GOAL
Beyond being good enough to justify more seasons of the show, Season 2 also did have larger goals. The first was to define a style and identity for the show moving forward, increase the overall production value of the show, as well as the average production value, since Season 1 was very inconsistent in quality. I think we succeeded in that goal.
The larger and more abstract goal was to attempt to restore some school spirit to B-CC. At the time, BCC was in the midst of a massive renovation. The renovation took away about half of the campus (which was already the smallest in the county) as well as the fields and consequently, home games. This, combined with a massive and unpopular change in administration led to a major decline in school spirit. Season 1 of the show had done a really good job bringing at least some of it back, our goal in Season 2 was to continue that.
THE RESOURCES
I touched on the resources we had available to us a bit, I'll elaborate on it more now. The resources the school had were actually surprisingly good. I'd thought they'd be terrible going in because of how bad Wake Up B-CC had looked, but I soon found out that was just because they had to stream it in such terrible quality. The TV Studio space itself is really great. You enter from the main hallway and there's a smaller hallway that has a door connecting it to the media center, an editing room with one computer, the TV studio itself, and a control room next to the studio with giant windows into the control room. We also had access to the Media Center's bank of 5 imacs as well as the checkout center.
The Media Center has a row of 5 imacs in the very back with Final Cut Pro X on them (ew), they were really annoying to use and for whatever reason they really liked to crash, some of them more than others. The Media Center staff also decided to not give our accounts administrative privileges, so every once and awhile something would come up that required a password or the machine would kick us out or something (eventually I was able to "procure" the admin password). I was also able to install Adobe Creative Cloud on the computer in the back corner so I didn't have to do everything in Final Cut or at home.
The editing room basically became my home second semester because at that point I became Ms. Pagán's "student aide", and instead of actually aiding her in her classroom, I aided her by going down to the editing room and working on the episode every day, which really helped speed up the editing process. It was also mostly safe from the Media Center staff. At the beginning some of them made kind of a stink about it but once Ms. Pagán made it clear to them that she'd keep sending me regardless, they left me alone. Plus, I knew the MST and he trusted me, he only ever got annoyed at me when I'd forget or "forget" to lock the door when I left since at that point it was second semester of senior year and occasionally I'd work on the episode during other periods, or just chill in there on the computer, I even hung out with some friends or other B-CC TV crew members during other periods a few times (sorry Bill, if you ever read this). It was a small white box with no windows and one imac that I was able to get Creative Cloud on, its main benefit was that it wasn't in the media center, and that it was quiet. There was also another table with a few other chairs.
The checkout center is where we got all of our equipment for anything shot outside of the TV studio. They had a few really nice cameras that only some of us got to use occasionally, but the vast majority of their equipment was standard HD camcorders. They also had tripods, light kits, extra SD cards, and microphones. This equipment was mostly good in terms of quality of the equipment, the issue was that we weren't the only people allowed to check things out. We shared the check out center with all of the film classes, and the low level film classes don't treat equipment with respect. This was only really a large problem with microphones, because by the end of the year there was only one working stick mic left. Film kids would also steal SD cards, so we'd have to juggle ours a lot.
The control room was a lot less important than it sounds. It was mainly used as a meeting place for when people were filming in the studio, or just as a place to take a break and chill during long nights of editing. Most of the equipment in there was defunct streaming equipment, the only thing we had to actually use was the imac, which was linked to the monitor behind the desk in the studio.
The TV studio was the main event, about the size of a large classroom, with a desk for the anchors, a background monitor behind the desk, a wall painted bright green in the back to serve as a green screen (it was actually really good), a few rows of different colored curtains that could be moved all around the studio, ceiling mounted lights, a control panel for the lights, more lights on C-Stands, another imac, and a door to a supply closet filled with odds and ends. We had two cameras in the room, each of them on a large tripod stand on wheels, they sat on top of an audio box that had a max of four audio inputs, the cameras were just slightly more advanced versions of the camcorders from the media center, but you could hardly tell because they were hiding under teleprompter mounts. Yes, we actually had a real teleprompter that we could control from the imac in the corner. Along with the cameras we had three wired lav mics as well. If you'd like a closer look at the studio feel free to have a look at this April Fools behind the scenes segment.
The main issue was not the resources themselves, but their availability. We were in a constant struggle to be able to do our jobs at all if Ms. Pagán wasn't there with us 24/7. The main issue is that the media center would close an hour after school ended, and we'd commonly have to be there until 9 PM or later. This was fine if Ms. Pagán was around, but she did this on a volunteer basis just like we did and also had to go to meetings and do teacher things, plus she coached the women's lacrosse team. Any time she was gone, various staff would (somewhat understandably) try to do their jobs and kick us out. We found some creative ways to stave this off/sneak back into the media center if need be. We'd get constantly locked out of things, too. Overall though, the resources were good despite our difficulties with being able using them.
THE STRUCTURE
The class was structured in an interesting way. It was technically called "Advanced Journalism" and we met once a day in first period and technically counted as an honors credit (and I'm sure that helped my GPA immensely).
As far as personnel goes, Ms. Pagán was obviously at the top as director, after that though kids were split into two categories: Anchors and Editors.
Anchors were basically anybody that appeared on camera, whether they were in the studio or in the field. They were organized by the Lead Anchors (Jay and Abby) who were the main in-studio anchors. Everybody else was a Specialty Anchor, which basically meant they created their own segment, except for the Sports Anchor who obviously just did the sports segment.
Editors were anybody that was behind the camera in an capacity. Editors don't just edit video, they run cameras and audio, do lighting, tend to the studio, check out equipment, and fix anything that breaks. Like the two Lead Anchors, there are also two Lead Editors, for Season 2 that was Camilo Montoya and I. The only difference between Lead Anchors and Lead Editors was that as Lead Editors, Camilo and I had to do a lot more task delegation as well as keep track of all the equipment people had checked out.
Now of course, we had a lot of editors including myself also anchor segments and some of the anchors like Mitchell and Granger actually edited their own segments, but those were the two general categories.
THE CREW
Obviously, the most important part of the show was the crew. And as much as I'm sure I told myself at the time, I definitely couldn't have done it all by myself. There were 20 people involved in Season 2 and working with such a unique group of people was a great experience. Everyone working on the show was technically doing so on a volunteer basis, and unlike ICTV, where everyone was at least majoring in communications, people came from all kinds of different areas of the school for B-CC TV meaning we had a lot of unique styles, takes and opinions on everything we did. And while that caused some chaos in the moment, I think it made the show better in the end and led to our show's unique voice.
Ms. Pagán was obviously an excellent director, and gave us as much creative leeway as she could while still keeping us on track. She gave us as much creative freedom as possible under the circumstances. She also went to bat for us against administration and the media center time and time again. Bill served as tech support and we checked out all our equipment and probably gave us way more leeway than he had to (or probably should've) while transitioning into a new job.
Unfortunately, this isn't the time or place to write out endorsements for everyone involved, but if anyone from Season 2 ever reads this, I learned a lot from working with you and I'd like to thank you for dealing with me as I learned how to actually work with other people.
THE SCHEDULE
The most challenging part of B-CC TV was definitely the schedule. Working on B-CC TV was a constant, never ending race against time. The episode HAD to be finished by Thursday night, every week, for an entire year. We all did maybe 80% of the work for the show in our free time, since we only met for one class period at 7:45 AM.
Mondays were when we would plan out the entire episode and attempt to organize who was going to do what.
Tuesdays were usually when we start having people go out and film their segments for the week, or at least finish developing them.
On Wednesday mornings we would record the anchors and the sports segment and our other segments would record as much material as we could. Then Wednesday afternoons we'd get started on editing, from 2:30 PM when school let out until about 4:00 when they'd close the media center and kick us out.
Thursday was the day where we would do like 80% of the work. Thursday morning in class we would just edit, but Thursday afternoon was crunch time. Once school got out we would rush to the media center and edit until the episode was done. Sometimes we would stay as late as 10:00 PM, and then upload the episode.
Friday was our one day of downtime, we would release the episode to the school and start thinking about what we'd do next week.
ESTABLISHING AN IDENTITY
Another important task I had was to establish an identity for the B-CC TV Brand. We knew from the get-go that we'd be using the school's blue and gold as our color scheme, so that was fairly easy. I also didn't design the logo, that was done by the endlessly talented Granger Martin. What I did do though was set the standards for how graphics looked on the show. I decided to go with a simple, modern, flat look to the graphics. The standard lower thirds for anchors weren't actually the original ones though.
I didn't just do things associated with the school colors though, I also did the logos and titles for many other segments throughout the year. Here're a few examples:
I also evolved how the sports graphics looked over the course of the year (the original versions were pretty rough).
In the end, the show still uses my exact same lower thirds and their new graphics are still based on the same framework I set up.
CHALLENGES
As you may have guessed from reading literally anything in this article, making this show was pretty hard.
For starters, everyone worked on a volunteer basis. Despite having to audition and there technically being a class, 90% of the work was done in our free time. Some people had more time to volunteer than others. Some people had incredibly difficult academic schedules with tons of homework, or played a sport, or were in musicals or some other extracurricular activity. Plus, all the other seniors and I were deep in the thick of the college admissions process for most of the year which is incredibly stressful and time consuming. Almost nobody was interested in TV long term, out of everyone that's ever been on the show at the time I'm writing this, I believe besides me only one of us has decided pursue broadcast as a career. Despite this, arguments still sprung up around how much time certain people put in vs. others.
Secondly, not everyone took the show seriously. Now that's perfectly understandable since all of us were high school kids working in our free time, but the difference in effort between members of the class caused a good amount of tension considering the schedule. This was a problem that Season 1 of the show didn't have, the crew in Season 1 was less than 10 students and they were creating the show as they went along, they never had time to slow down or let someone else pick up the slack. With 20 people in the class during Season 2, we initially thought we'd be able to get a lot more done than we actually could because there was a tendency with some members of the class to just let other people do the hard work. In other words, we were high school students.
We also had to fight constantly to even be able to our jobs. We'd constantly have to fix equipment, get locked out of places, have computers crash, have the media center deny us equipment, deal with administration trying to meddle in our content, and of course, be constantly threatened with being kicked out of the media center even though they knew who we were and we did exactly the same thing every week.
Then of course there was dealing with criticism. The show got bombarded with a good amount of criticism because we couldn't keep all 2,000+ students, 100 odd faculty members, and administration happy all the time. External criticism was hard to deal with because it was so fractured. You'd hear different things from different groups of people that conflicted with one another, 50 people might love the episode and another 50 might hate it. 50 people might think the show is too silly and another 50 would insist that the show is too boring and needs more funny segments. Everybody in the crew also had their own friend groups that would give feedback on the episode. People also wouldn't come directly with us with feedback either, even when we announced a suggestion box, we got zero submissions. So basically, despite the overall perception of the show quite positive, it was very confusing to unpack and almost none of it was constructive or had any solutions attached to it. This lead to contentious internal discussions about what we thought about the shows and it really decreased the productivity of discussions about the show to the point where people would frequently snap at each other or get into large arguments (something I was definitely guilty of at the time). People also had different ways of trying to change the show, some of us wanted to just lightly critique even the largest issues, and others wanted to just call out all the issues with the show, which caused a lot of arguments. I was definitely in the latter camp and definitely went in too hard on people sometimes, but both sides of the debate were equally petty at their worst.
The schedule was maybe the biggest issue because it compounded all the other issues, it's not a healthy time frame to do work in since we only had the very first class of the day when everyone was half asleep of actual school time dedicated to the school. This meant many, many, late Thursday nights where we'd get home after 10 or 11 PM on a school night. The tightness of the schedule combined with the difficulty of creating the show meant that everyone that worked on the show was really stressed all the time because we basically had to throw together a show that the entire school, plus many parents would watch every week.
Of course, if you're reading between the lines you can basically guess that there was a lot of drama. It's high school so that was already expected, but B-CC TV Season 2 was crazy even by those standards. All the above factors combined with your normal creative differences and clashing egos meant that there was almost always some sort of low level controversy simmering behind the scenes that would eventually blow up and have to be resolved. It wasn't really anybody's fault, the environment was not great for preventing conflict. Despite this, the majority of us still respected one another at the end of the day and I'm still lucky enough to be friends with or at least on good terms with the majority of that class. And by the end of the year, the environment really improved once we'd figured out our style and the direction we really wanted to take the show.
RECEPTION AND LEGACY
I hinted at it before, but despite all the challenges, the constant uphill battle, the crazy schedule and clashing egos, the show was a great success. Reception was overall very positive from the entire community and I think we balanced people's interests very well. We met all of our goals from the start of the season too. We'd upped the overall quality of the show immensely, as well as established B-CC TV as a long term part of the B-CC community. In the second half of the year, when we really hit our stride, I think we were making the best episodes of B-CC TV to ever air in terms of average quality.
In terms of viewership, it far surpassed what we expected. Obviously every week we knew that the whole school was going to watch the episode during Friday, so we knew we had a minimum of ~2,200 eyes on it every week. What we didn't expect was the YouTube engagement. We thought that the only views it would get were from the teachers pulling it up on their computers to project to the class, but instead we found that each episode wound up getting an additional 300-1200 extra views on YouTube. It turns out that some kids either watch the episode on their own, and/or rewatch parts of the episodes, and some parents and community members also tune in every week, despite it not being advertised at all. The channel at this time has about 500 subscribers and has over 65,000 YouTube views, which is ridiculous because we don't promote it at all.
People actively seek out the show which is really cool. So even though the amount of views on those videos seems strangely high on their own, you have to factor in the amount of people watching it in their classrooms, so for some of those views the 1 YouTube view equals 20-30 real views. Because of this I'd estimate that our episodes usually got between 2,500-4,000 views every week. That's insane engagement for a weekly YouTube show made entirely by students at some random high school in Maryland.
Even our YouTube exclusive videos generated lots of traffic. For example, the hype video we made for our big basketball match with our arch rivals Walt Whitman High School is now sitting at over 2,300 views, all of which came from outside of the classroom since it wasn't part of an episode or required viewing, we just announced it over social media when it was done. It got out into the community and attracted the attention of everyone from Whitman themselves to one of the old players in the video. Adrian Stewart who is in one of the opening clips from the class of 1990 commented on the video wishing us luck, it really got out there.
Overall, Season 2 of B-CC TV was a complete and total success by every metric, especially when compared to what came before. It was an amazing experience that taught me a lot of important lessons (including that I wanted to do TV as a career) and we were able to bring it all together, despite the challenges, and really cement the show as a B-CC staple. The show has since gone on for another two seasons at the time of writing this and has grown immensely, and in 2020, it won 4 Capital Emmy Awards.
