This can’t be school. There are celebrity interviews and production conferences. Camera crews and camera shoots. Takes and retakes. Studio segments and man-on-the-street pieces.
But look closer and, yes, those are high school students behind the microphones and cameras. “Giants in Action,” the show they are producing, may look like pure television, but it’s actually a place where “20/20” meets Highland Park High School: half TV show, half class.
Although the object of the class is to teach students about television, the show they produce in their laboratory is a full-fledged video production experience that no class confined to lectures and desks could duplicate. And the end product is sent out over the air waves for every cable subscriber in Highland Park and Highwood (5 and 7 p.m. Monday through Friday; 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday on Post-Newsweek Cable Channel 4). It’s something like having your term paper–grade A or grade F–mailed to the entire community.
Yes, the show has some rough edges: lighting that leaves half a face in shadow, or an interview that inadvertently uses a public restroom as a backdrop–the MEN sign smack in between the interviewer and the interviewee–so that men duck in and out of the facility as an instructor is questioned about this year’s student theater production called Stunts ’96. Or the coverage of the Ravinia Best of the Midwest Market that fails to tell when and where the event had taken place.
But get past some amateur mishaps and there are plenty of big-time benefits to the show’s viewers and its producers alike.
And perhaps more fundamentally comes this realization: Television is a big part of the present and will be a big part of the future. Educators can try to resist that, or they can embrace it and help students conquer it. Highland Park chose the latter.
“The kids are alive, learning in the most hands-on way possible,” said Steve Alsberg of Skokie, who teaches the class with Tom Vogelsang of Evanston.
Students learn every element of TV production, rotating through jobs such as anchors, directors, camera people and sound engineers. The opportunity to be just like the big guys, students say, is what attracts them to the elective class.
“We learn tricks you would see on a regular television show,” said senior Kevin Croke, who plans to have a career in communications. “Like when I interview someone and we shoot first over my shoulder. Later we’ll come back–the person who was interviewed doesn’t have to be there–we’ll put the camera on me. Someone saw us doing that and said, `Wow, when NBC was here, they did the same thing.’ “
“We write our own stuff, we work all of the equipment, so it’s all us,” said senior Mike Berman. “After we finish a show, we sit around and talk about what to do for the next show.”
The magic of television lets the kids “see themselves in action as well as get feedback from all kinds of people about what a great job they do,” Vogelsang said. It also generates young fans who, long before they get to high school, dream of joining the cast.
“I watched `Giants in Action’ in 7th grade, and I said back then, `I want to do that when I am in high school,’ ” Berman said.
“Giants in Action” uses a magazine-style format to cover events on campus–homecoming, a pep rally, a student robotics competition–and also fans out to off-campus spots such as the National Weather Service in Romeoville, Santa Claus at Marshall Field’s for Christmas, a turkey farm at Thanksgiving. “Giants in Action” cameras were rolling when Nancy Reagan made a campaign stop in Deerfield in the 1980s. A few years back the class ventured to the Chicago Bears’ Lake Forest training camp to tape a piece that ended with Richard Dent picking up a student and saying. “You have to grow a little to interview me.”
The class meets daily, with two days being devoted to lab work and those classes being 84 minutes rather than the normal 42-minute class. During labs, half the students stay at the high school to film and edit. The other half goes to the nearby Post-Newsweek Cable studios to tape introductions and transitions.
During a recent session at the cable company, students, under Vogelsang’s watchful eye, worked on camera angles and lighting for a complex introduction that depicted a suspect being interrogated by students portraying police. To give the suspect’s point of view, the scene was shot over his shoulder, looking into the eyes of the questioners, who moved their faces close to the camera to achieve an eerie effect. Time ran out before the shoot was completed, and the students agreed to finish during the next class.
In earlier years, introductions “were very simple, with two kids sitting at a table telling what the next piece will be,” said Vogelsang, who has taught the course for eight years. They evolved into more elaborate segments, “which gets more kids in front of the camera and lets them experiment with techniques of shooting a scene,” he said.
Meanwhile, back at the school, several students planned interview questions before going to shoot footage of a cultural fair.
“Let’s ask, `What aspects of culture do you hope to share with the public?’ ” suggested senior Janet Datcu.
Alsberg cautioned the group to avoid common interview pitfalls. “Don’t just interview your friends; walk around and talk to a lot of different people.”
He also sent them off with some last-minute camera advice. “We haven’t mastered the close-up shots yet. Hold a shot still for the count of 10, even if you think it’s too long. I’d rather have long than constantly moving.”
Alsberg has taught the class for its entire 12-year history, and in fact, he hatched the idea for the show in the early 1980s, when cable was being introduced to Highland Park.
“It occurred to me it would be a wonderful opportunity as part of the city’s franchise agreement with the cable company for the school to be able to use its production facilities to produce and air a regularly scheduled TV program,” Alsberg said.
In its first year the students produced one show a week, recalled Assistant Supt. Susan Benjamin, who taught the class with Alsberg in the beginning. “It was crazy. The kids would be at my house until 10 p.m. It was our weekends, our evenings, but we loved it so much we didn’t care.”
Now one show is produced every few weeks, but it still takes a large time commitment from the students. Class homework is to come in during free periods, study halls and after school to edit.
“Editing takes a lot of patience,” Alsberg said. “What takes them two hours to shoot takes 15 hours of editing. In order to succeed, they have to sacrifice other things.”
The show “allows students to give their impressions of the world in another way,” Alsberg said. “They’re not always successful, but they come up with nifty ideas.”
While the process is highly educational, Benjamin points out that “the product serves a worthwhile mission as well. `Giants in Action’ educates the community to what high school is like from a student’s point of view.”
They may be amateurs, but that does not hold some “Giants in Action” students back from achieving very professional-looking results, said Alsberg, who estimates 30 to 40 students have gone on to pursue TV-related careers.
Berri Cooper, a senior at Highland Park High School last year, did just that with a probing piece about the youths who skateboard in downtown Highland Park. There were shots of skateboarders flying off the pavement in all directions, even over-the-camera shots and shots that required the camera person to follow on a skateboard.
The television class was “a place where she could shine,” Alsberg said of Cooper, who clocked more editing time than “any student I had in the last 10 years.”
Cooper, now a freshman at Columbia College in Chicago, was no novice with the camera when she started the class. She and her brothers and sisters all grew up working on the crew of her mother’s weekly public-access cable show, North Shore Live.
“But `Giants in Action’ gave me an outlet to edit and create,” she said. “Instead of just studio shooting, we went out on shoots. It showed me the different side, not just the studio where you sit there and flip switches. I got to work with different camera angles, lighting and special effects.”
Cooper recalled spending many hours absorbed in editing pieces. A 25-second introduction to a spot about the band Nine Inch Nails took seven hours to edit, she said. Cooper is majoring in TV communications and hopes to take her television career “all the way.”
“Our arrangement with Post-Newsweek is unique as far as their letting us use their facilities as a classroom,” Benjamin said. “Many schools have in-house TV programs. What Highland Park has that’s really different is that we have a TV program that is seen by the community. We get a tremendous amount of feedback.”
Turning the cameras over to students has been a perfect teaching opportunity, according to Post-Newsweek program director Frank Deuel.
“Instead of just sitting with a textbook, it gives students a chance to actually get their hands on the equipment,” he said. “What more creative crowd could we get to do a show than high school students?” he asked. “They have imagination, they are a media-conscious crowd, and this show gives them an opportunity to produce their own experiences.”
Although no official ratings measure the viewership, Deuel said, he knows it’s a popular program by the community feedback. “A good segment will get 100 or 200 phone calls asking when it is on or how to get a copy of the tape.
“We also do a family factor,” he said, which takes into account that for every student on the show there will be parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who will watch it. Public-access programming generates no ad revenue, but the cable company values the program because it has value to its customer, he said.
Too, the students “learn to be effective consumers of the media, because they understand what goes into creating a television message. They also realize that editing creates the message, . . .” Benjamin said. “It is the new medium for information dissemination. They learn to use it and analyze it effectively.”
