Producer - Lee Danek
Featuring:
Sylvia Gruner
Pam Leck
And Lee Danek
Click on almost any image to view a larger version.
You may have already met Sylvia, Lee, and Pam from watching our shows. Or, you simply have enjoyed our recipes from this website. Either way, there's a lot going on behind the scenes in the production of our shows and we thought we'd share some of that with you.We've been taping Thyme In The Kitchen, or TIK for short, since the middle of 2003. At the urging of Tina Bemis, who along with her husband Ed has her own show called Bloomin' With the Bemis', Lee Danek started "thinking" about a cooking show. Then, because two other residents of Spencer, MA - Sylvia Gruner and Pam Leck - expressed interest in "doing a cooking show" for the town, Lee finally agreed to produce it. Oh, and did we mention that she's one of the show's stars? (In the video business, we call our stars the "talent".)
TIK is a production of Ground Glass Productions, of which the shakers and movers are Casey and Lee Danek. Casey does the videography and editing. Lee, basically, is his Boss. They do get along, too, quite nicely, married as they are. The full TIK team however includes, in addition to Casey and Lee as video-guy and producer, the show's "talent" - Sylvia, Pam, and Lee...and some really nice "background" folks who volunteer their time to help make the show a possibility. For its first two years, Eric Hope (shown here on the right) ran second camera and helped with equipment setup and teardown. He, himself, appeared on the show twice. Once as an elf in our first Christmas program. This was but a brief exposure on the small screen and it may have given him the bug to want to do more because his second appearance, a much longer endeavor, was during our Chicken Recipes Show where he made his "Famous Red Hot Chicken Wings" specialty.
Lately, we have had a new member on the background team. Paul C. McKinney (shown here on the left) is, first and foremost, a film actor having appeared in recent movies. The most notable effort was Freedom Park which was filmed in Massachusetts. He is a life-long Spencer resident, but is "bi-coastal" in that he also claims Los Angeles, the hub of film making in the world, as home. He is currently working on several film projects and, while doing that here in Spencer, discovered TIK by watching Spencer Cable Access (SCA). He was impressed enough with the the show's production values to approach Carol McPherson, SCA's station manager, with an offer to help...as long as he could help with TIK. We are happy to have him on board.
We've already mentioned Casey and here he is, on the right. Casey can also be seen on Mechanical Innovations with Rollie Gaucher, a show which Paul McKinney produces independently. On that show, Casey is the color commentary to another Spencer celebrity, Rollie Gaucher, whose technical wisdom and mechanical skills are really what the show is about. Casey's and Rollie work out nicely together as they've been neighbors for about 25 years. On the TIK shoots, however, Casey is another of the background workers where, according to Paul, Casey is the Director Of Photography and Lighting Director. Basically, that means he sets up the lights and cameras and gets to call "Action!" to get things going.
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| Lee directs, while Pam practices her lines. Sylvia checks for accuracy in Cooking For Dummies. |
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TECH TALK: In the normal setup, the idea is to have a key light on the side with a high fill with a near even balance in light intensity between the two. Sometimes this makes our "stage" look flat and uninteresting but, darn it, we seem always to make the food look good...and that is key, isnt' it? |
Of course, the image above was done as a gag. We really don't use Cooking For Dummies as a kitchen reference. The TIK ladies are far beyond that. What we wanted to show here was a typical session and how we had our equipment set up for it. Things haven't changed too much since 2003 when this photograph was made. We still use the same location for most of our shoots. We credit it as "SCA South Annex" in our videos, but it's really Lee's own kitchen.
Show designs start with our "talent". They plan out shows well in advance and think about the logistics of pulling them together. We're all pretty good at it now, but it wasn't always this way. In fact, for the very first practice shoot, we taped them making buttered toast while explaining the video production process as we went along. Try this yourself, someday, in front of a pretend camera with an imaginary crew looking at your every move, waiting for your first mistake, waiting for the director to yell "Cut!" when you goof...it's not that easy. But we all learned quickly and jelled as a team.Planning involves selecting a theme for a show, then the recipes within the theme, then who gets to make what. Experience has taught us how to select things so that our shows fit, somewhat, within an hour. This is, generally, a comfortable show length for Cable Access broadcasts. Of course, if you've followed our shows, you'll know that we've done lots of Part 1's and Part 2's. That's because, no matter how well we think we've planned, a segment can just get really, really "yummie". We often have a bit too much material and, because the TIK ladies are so good at what they do, we hate leaving anything on the "cutting room floor". So, we pretty much show everything they make and, what doesn't fit into the first hour, simply gets put into a Part 2 segment. Once we've planned what we're going to make, we set a date, reserve the equipment we'll need, get everyone scheduled for a few hours, and set up and go. Usually, things work very smoothly and we rarely have to do retakes. A retake in a cooking show can be very expensive. Imagine asking someone to reshoot that first juicy slice into a perfectly done Beef Wellington because the Director Of Photography forgot to turn on one of the cameras. After shooting all the segments onto MiniDV tape, Casey (and Paul, and before him, Eric) pack up and return the equipment. Casey takes the tapes and prepares them for loading into a computer. Modern PC's are amazingly powerful and can process the bazillions of bits of information (a bazillion is something slightly smaller than a gagillion) allowing the editor to make strategic cuts and splices. The pace of the final show needs to keep moving along, and we often crisp up the segments leaving in just the essentials. With TIK, we often have three cameras. In some shows, we've even had four. This means there are four sets of tapes that need to be put into the computer and then viewed by the editor for A-roll, B-roll, C-rool, and so on. The additiona 'roll's are the overhead and/or closeup shots that are inserted, in sync, with the main A-roll video. This sync-ing process is time consuming. Casey does this work and claims that, after he's spun out the final version, he will have viewed any one show 20 times or more - over and over - to get it just right. But, he adds, "It's alwasy fun to watch them again and again later on because the TIK ladies are just so good."
All of our shows are done in cooperation with SCA, Spencer Cable Access. SCA provides most of the equipment we use for taping and supplies the many MiniDV tapes we use up. In return, we provide a Video DVD copy of the show, or an MPEG file version. Lately, SCA has been broadcasting using a video server which need MPEGS instead of Video DVD's. Either way, we make what they need and give it to them. Next, because our program is shown in more towns than just Spencer, we have to make a bunch of DVD's. SCA is not in the business of supplying other towns with programs. In fact, each town with a Cable Access capability is, in reality, an entity unto itself. Towns are on their own for programming. So, to get TIK seen by more people in more towns, Ground Glass Productions comes into play; we make lots of DVD's...often burning more that 25 copies for the distribution, archiving, and other purposes. Casey estimates that it take about 40 hours of combined work by all the team members to produce a single 30 to 45 minute show.
So, there you have it...a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes at Thyme In The Kitchen. |
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TECH TALK: Casey uses a Windows XP based PC with either Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 or Sony Vegas 6. Lately (in the past year), he's settled on Vegas. He really likes the user interface and the fact that the program rarely crashes. (Imagine doing an hour's worth of edits only to have everything lost because of a system crash.) You may wonder why things sometimes do not work - like system crashes? Videos really are very large...very VERY large. The joke about a bazillion isn't too far off from reality. A 45 minute DVD requires an MPEG file that's roughly ^two to three billion bytes^. (Note: gigabytes are billions of byes, and a bazillion bytes are way-too-many gigabytes.) To get to this final product, sometimes 10 or 20 times as much disk space gets used up in temporary files. It's no suprise that the PC's that are used for video editing need to be so powerful.
