The Great Handcar Regatta, was a blitzkrieg of colorful creative artistry! A local community event involving several live stages, tents, vendors, exhibitions, scheduled handcar races along a functional railroad track and tens of thousands of spectators and participants spread over approximately 3+ square city blocks.  The event was viewed live as far away as Japan! It is the largest production conducted by the local community media center still to date.

The production utilized a 25-person crew of sweaty volunteers, who ran 6 cameras.  2 cameras sent live feed to both the Internet and television, and 4 others were roaming around the maybem collecting footage of festival activities. The tapes were then brought back to the production truck via runners, captured, and aired “semi-live.” It was a 14-hour production day in 100 degree heat!

I designed the program to be a live and “semi-live” production.  Pre-production required locating many outside collaborators who would donate existing video, graphics, and still images, which were used to produce interview packages, video interstitials and many identifying slates for the program.  The production also required establishing invaluable working relationships with community business owners to establish web connection, power sources, etc.

There was no precedence at the community media center for this style of remote semi-live & live production. It was pretty groundbreaking for them and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to do it.