Tomorrow night is the 42nd Annual CMA Awards live from Nashville at 8:00 PM ET on ABC.

We’ll hit the air at 7:30 PM with the RTV6 CMA Countdown, our live pre-show special from the red carpet. As part of the pre-production for tomorrow’s special, I was asked to put together the open for the broadcast.

Here’s what you’ll see tomorrow at 7:30 PM following 6 News at 7:00:

The CMA Awards are closing in quickly.

Every November you can count on ABC to pull out the “country’s night to rock” line. The awards are Wednesday night in Nashville, and aside from the actual awards show, we send a crew down for our live CMA Countdown from the venue.

Here’s an early look at the promo we put together. It starts running tonight during primetime. My boss produced the spot, Steve shot Paul Poteet and the gang from WFMS, Kirk designed the 3D logo and I edited and added effects. Take a look:

Should be a good show this year, I don’t even like country music, but the awards broadcast is usually pretty fun to watch.

I did my civic duty today. And boy, did it feel good.

It wasn’t even painful.

In Indiana there had been a lot of talk about how long it would take the typical Hoosier to vote. Some people have waited in lines for as long as 3 hours, just to get inside the polling place. I would have been glad to wait that long to make sure my voice was heard, but I didn’t have to.

My wait didn’t even come close.

I walked into Indianapolis Fire Department Station 5 around 9:50am; and walked out at 10:00am.

Easy. Simple. Painless.

Then I got to work.

Sweeps is always hectic at a TV station, but Election day at the beginning of ratings is especially crazy. I fully expect to put in 12 hours today, if not more. It’ll all be worth it in the end, though.

Instead of the typical “here’s what’s coming up at 5:00pm” promo, I took a different approach.

Here’s the spot that starts running in about 15 minutes:

We’ll see how long we’re on the air, and how long before we know who the President-elect will be.

(Some are betting we’ll know the next President by 11:00pm, I’m saying 2:00 or 3:00am)

Feel free to share.

Full images are 4500 x 6000 (approximately 10.5MB).

Barack Obama wins

John McCain wins

Sweeps is upon us, and that means not only are political candidates vying for your vote, but so are television stations.

November sweeps and elections go hand-in-hand. All the local TV stations try to out perform the competition by promising “the most experienced news team,” “accurate reporting,” or “trust.”

I could talk all day about my competition’s position on such issues, but why would I want to? Instead, I want to ask you: “This November, can we count on your remote?”

Well, sometimes you really do need a montage. They don’t always have to be the Rocky kind of montage; but those are pretty cool, most of the time. I think Forrest Gump running across the country is a montage. Do pornos have montages? Oh, and any time Santa delivers presents it’s in a montage.

Anyways…

We needed a nice montage to wrap up a presentation to a bunch of representatives and clients. The network put together a fantastic opening montage (which I cannot share here, unless I want the “Mouse” to come and smother me in my sleep).

Their piece highlights all of the popular returning shows and new series for the fall, and also reminds you how much you both love and hate Meredith Grey and her whiny attitude. “Boohoo, McDreamy doesn’t love me-Yay! He loves me again.” Get over it, he’s going to end up with the Chief at the end of the series. Just wait. You’ll see.

We needed to put together our own montage for a nice little bow on the whole pitch. The creative process was… well, odd on this one. My boss wrote a quick script, with a bunch of throw-away lines. We knew that we wanted to show the big events, but had no idea where the piece was going.

By the way, I spent hours keyframing track mattes to make the ribbons and bubbles go behind the people and objects. This is what I came up with:

Every year the networks bring in big advertisers to showcase what’s coming next year and where there will be great improvements. They’re called the “Upfronts,” and each network holds their own. There’s a lot of bull that gets tossed around usually, but you can get a great idea of the new shows coming in the fall.

Locally, affiliates invite their big clients in to watch a closed circuit feed of the “Upfronts,” which take place in New York. At most stations a special video is then produced to hand out to advertisers, to show them what’s coming this fall.

We receive a lot of content from network for this presentation, but sometimes logos have to be covered up or changed. And sometimes you need elements that don’t exist. Here’s just a sampling of some projects from today:

Network Upfront ID
Since sometimes our clients are national, we needed a transition device that would cover a big jump cut and remind people where we are.
http://www.sethkeever.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/network_upfront_id.flv

Network Upfront Endtag
ABC’s “Black Pearl” is pretty, but we wanted to use our ABC/RTV6 logo at the end. This took a while to fake…
http://www.sethkeever.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/network_upfront_entag.flv

That’s where we’re at right now. I’ll be updating this post as I finish more elements, including a pretty awesome daily program lineup, if all goes as planned.

If you’re in Indiana, then you know about the severe weather that passed through last Friday night and again today.

I personally thought we did a great job with our coverage. We’re very aware that you’re actually watching us to see programming, not sitting at home praying we’re going to interrupt your cerebral numbing with weather happening 100 miles away from you. To that end, we do our best to not cover programming. We wait until ABC goes to a break, we cut in, then get you back in time for our local break and back into the show.

During last Friday’s storms, we did our best, and did it pretty well. We didn’t cover any of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee, which let Hoosiers see an Indiana boy take the prize. We did blow off 20/20, but at that point the storms were extremely severe on Indianapolis’ east-side.

We spent the entire weekend covering the severe weather, so on Monday I was asked to put together a P.O.P. (Proof of Performance) spot. Here’s what we put together in just a few hours, with very little determined going in to the project (really, the music was the only thing we knew would make it into the spot).

So, that was our fun Monday at RTV6. Be expecting these spots to change on Wednesday, as we get more video in from the TWO tornadoes Tuesday evening (does that make it a two-fer Tuesday?).