Last year at this time, TV Production at Bromfield was just an extracurricular club, run by a few Class of 2015 seniors and populated mostly by rambunctious but hilarious sixth-grade boys. Since then, the school administrators have turned the club into an elective at Bromfield, and now TV Production is just finishing its first calendar year as an official school course.
In the class, students in grades 9 to 12 sign up as either semester or full-year students and produce a daily morning news show. Students who would like to serve as anchors rotate through the position frequently and record the Bromfield morning announcements, while others prefer to write the script, work the cameras, and edit the final products.
At the end of each school day, the Bromfield Now! episodes for the next day are posted on YouTube and embedded in the Bromfield PSHarvard homepage. Each episode starts with a basic introduction, and the two anchors alternate reciting the morning announcements for the day. Occasionally, the students will put together a longer piece. For example, they recently interviewed talented Bromfield artists Hunter Coleman and Emma Kassel, both juniors. They also interviewed Cam Maddalone, a junior on the Bromfield ski team.
The club now produces these two-minute news packages, dubbed Bromfield Now!, like clockwork, but it took dedication to get there.
At the beginning of the year, the class was based in one of the school’s computer labs. Martha Brooks, last year’s club adviser and this year’s course teacher, used to teach graphic arts courses there before she accepted the position as the theater teacher at the start of this school year. It made more sense for her to teach in her old lab than to teach in her computer-less theater classroom.
Without any framework for a curriculum, Brooks and her students spent a good while trying to get their bearings in the beginning of the year. Senior Nick Steele said that it was important for the group to have conversations so they could adjust the curriculum to benefit everyone.
The group started by filming interviews in an elevator. The elevator, though not ideal, provided a quiet space, passable lighting, and surprisingly great audio quality. Brooks said that everyone started calling the elevator the “satellite studio.”
However, it quickly became apparent that the class needed the Harvard Cable TV studio space full time to produce quality work. The 2015 relocation of the HCTV studio to the basement of Bromfield, along with its subsequent renovation, was originally intended to get a project like Bromfield Now! off the ground.
In the studio, students have access to several iMacs equipped with editing software programs FinalCut Pro and Premier Pro. There are also several HD cameras, two green screens, two teleprompters, lighting equipment, and a Tricaster, which creates the animated green screen background as well as switching which camera is broadcast to a live audience during a two-camera shoot. In essence, students have full access to all the equipment required to produce a show.
During each 45-minute class period, students set up lighting, test microphones, record the show, and upload the finished product to YouTube.
The Tricaster is one of the more challenging parts of TV Production. Sophomore Corey DiGugliemo stepped up to the task. Even though he was a quiet kid in the beginning of the year, somewhere down the line, Brooks said, he did a 180-degree flip. According to Brooks, one day he just said, “I’m going to do this.” He worked hard throughout the year, and Brooks says that he is now one of the program’s most valuable assets.
TV Production has made leaps this year, working from square one to producing a news package every day. However, Brooks has even bigger plans for the future. There was a small creative component to the class where students could independently come up with a film idea, plan it, shoot it, and edit it using class time. Brooks would like to define that track further and create a better framework.
As far as improving the news segment, Brooks hopes to get students covering sports games and the like with camera equipment, so they can use that extra footage in their broadcasts. She also hopes to work with her students to design a new virtual news set for the green screen, making it more relevant to Harvard.
“We had a good year,” Brooks said.
