So for the Indianapolis 500 this past weekend, the good folks from Extra graced us with their presence. My department got to help out with production do production for the show.

We shot all of the standups and wraparounds with Mario Lopez, plus an interview with Danica Patrick in her garage.

If you haven’t seen Extra, they open the show with people tossing around a “monitor” playing video of something. For anyone not in television, it’s just a flat piece of wood painted green, with a checkerboard pattern for motion tracking so it can be added later in post-production. They usually have the person toss the board at the camera to finish out the opening. Danica was holding the board, and it was my job to sit right beneath the lens of the camera and catch it as she tossed it to me.

The first throw was a little low, it kind of looked like she tossed it on the ground. Our photographer told her to “throw it a little higher and flatter.” Boy did she come through. The board made a pretty nice parabolic arc, and came down gracefully, right on top of my head. I was assaulted by Danica Patrick with a piece of green wood.

We did a third take which ended up being a keeper. You can watch the raw video from ExtraTV.com after the jump, and see all the pics we snapped while working with Mario.

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So the other day we were flipping through channels and came across Will Smith and Vivica A. Fox staring at an alien spaceship hovering above Los Angeles.

It was Independence Day running on A&E, Smith’s second outing as a lead in a major motion picture (Bad Boys came out the year before).

I’m a big fan of brain rot. The movie was on, I didn’t feel like flipping or checking what we had recorded on the DVR. But it wasn’t complete brain rot because we learned that Commander, now Colonel, Casey (Adam Baldwin from Chuck and Firefly) had a major role as a Major in Independence Day. I didn’t even remember that!

Anyway, there’s a scene where Jeff Goldblum is drunk inside a basement lab at Area 51. He’s complaining about how we’re all going to die because of these aliens. Talk about a pity party (and a sure Buzz Killington). So Goldblum’s yelling at Judd Hirsch about all of this, then trips over a bunch of equipment. We’re probably supposed to the infer the crates are to hold top secret equipment, yet they look like field cases for cameras. Movie magic.

Wait. That might actually be a case to the camera and the gear from the people producing the movie.

Want to know where I got that from?

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I started writing this post in January, before the originally DTV switch date. Then I got lazy and didn’t finish. Par for the course.

Now in May, I’ve decided to revisit, rewrite and expand this post.

Let’s begin with the theory I’ve presented in the title of this post, “DTV is not HDTV, seriously!”

Guess what? There was a small typo.

DTV is not HDTV, SERIOUSLY!

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