Video Production with Discovery Scouts
Throughout my early education I was in the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program. For those of you not familiar with this program it generally associated you as a nerd from an early age and stuck with you through high school. I did get an opportunity to do a lot of fun and interesting things and I probably would not be where I am today, particularly with computers, had I not been in that program. We didn’t have TAG program in high school, but an old TAG instructor of mine introduced me to something call the Explorer Scout program during my sophomore year.
The Explorer Scout program takes various youth and tries to expose them to areas of business in which they may have a career interest. I was invited to join a group of other high school students from around the area at TCI (the local cable company) to work on a project to create a public service announcement. The goal was to familiarize us with the technology and the equipment as well as all the other project management aspects of creating, shooting and producing an on-air segment.
The PSA we created was a rather pointless and mediocre production having to something to do with a help the homeless campaign. The group basically disbanded one at a time near the end of the project and myself and an Indian guy (I forget his name but I think it may have been Samid) ended up finishing the project basically to say it was done. He was the TCI staff person assigned to supervise the group and basically the person who did all the real work as far as production at TCI. Working with him turned out to be the real benefit to me. Not long after that project, he called me back and signed me up to work there through a temp agency, and I ended up spending many long evenings and nights working on the authoring and production of many commercials, PSA’s and other segments used on-air at TCI.