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)

Here’s a first peek at the latest campaign we’re running at RTV6 for 6 News at 7:00.

These spots should debut over the weekend.

I think we did a great job, considering how quickly we put this spot together. We took more than half of the stills on Wednesday, grabbed the other images from stock photography and composited everything together in only 8 bench hours.

Steve B. took all the stills we used, except for the guy at the desk. I did all the Photoshop work to cut elements out from the background, and duplicate elements to become background plates. And I did the After Effects “camera” work and design. I must say, it came together nicely.

Look for it this weekend.

Or at least that’s what Judge (of Judge’s Barbecue [link]) had to say when we used him for the latest A-List [link] campaign.

If you don’t know, the A-List is a collection of local businesses, grouped by categories, that users can rank, comment and vote for. Think, the phone book at a bar, but with more pages and less stuff scribbled inside. It’s managed by a company called CityVoter.

Part of our agreement is to push the service on Channel 6 a couple of times a year. In this case, it’s to announce that voting for the best businesses of 2008 has been opened.

My boss came to me on a Friday with the script, we looked it over and hammered out a rough idea for what we wanted. Last week, we ran out and spent the day shooting people from area businesses (if you follow me on Twitter, you know all about it).

We managed to piece a spot together, then shot some more business-folks and tada, this is the :30:

The most fun we had was with the guys at Sakura, mainly because we had just eaten around 7 sushi rolls between the two of us. They had a fun time with their lines, and the customers seemed to enjoy it, too.

So, go online and vote for your favorite local business. It’s easy, just visit The A-List at TheIndyChannel.com

We also hacked that spot down to make a :15, :10 and a :05. The rest were all kind of guesses of what to use and how they would flow. Read on to see those 3 spots.

[Note: Silly case-sensitive server. I could have published this last night, if I wasn't suffering stupidity.]

Read the rest…

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.

People said no one would watch. People said it wouldn’t last. People said there’s no way viewers will keep watching season after season. And yet, dancing fever struck a chord.

Especially last fall.

Who would have thought that Helio Castroneves, an IRL driver and 2-time Indianapolis 500 champ you wouldn’t know unless you kept track of the track, would win Dancing With The Stars and bring in the show’s highest ratings in the country right here in Indianapolis?

Well Hoosiers loved Helio and Julianne so much that Ms. Hough is performing the National Anthem at this year’s Indianapolis 500. I’m not sure if some people (including Hoosiers) realize how big of a deal this is. This is the largest single-day sporting event in the world, seen by racing fans around the globe. This could definitely help Julianne gain exposure as a recording artist.

But she’s not the point of this post. RTV6 (WRTV - ABC) has secured Helio Castroneves to be our “Driver Analyst” on Trackside 6 this year.

Amazing.

To that end, it has to be promoted. Here are the spots we’re using on-air to let the viewers know.

My boss wrote the spot, I produced and edited. Let’s just say, that I’m more than impressed these spots made it to air; especially considering we turned these in less than 6 hours (including audio cuts, hunting for video and crazy post-production to make that ribbon dance around Helio).

Enjoy.