New building leads to progress for SHSTV

“And we’re on in three, two…”

Juniors Nicole Shadman and Talia Sisco sit in movie director chairs, reporting news that will soon stream throughout the entire school. Accompanied by the wide green screen walls and supplied with the necessary new technology to create a video report, students in the Multimedia Journalism feel as if they’re in a professional television studio.

With the addition of the high-tech MAP building to campus, Saratoga High School TV hopes to improve its news videos as students begin to make the first stories in the program’s second year of existence. SHSTV, with a staff of sophomores, juniors and seniors, was started last year as a third student-run journalism program, in addition to the Falcon newspaper and Talisman yearbook staffs. Now that its largely experimental inaugural year has ended, SHSTV can begin to function as an established school-wide institution.

“We are a lot more organized this year,” said Tony Palma, SHSTV’s adviser and teacher. “Our videos will be made with the same idea as last year, but now that we have a year’s experience, we have the opportunity to be much better.”

Many members of SHSTV’s original staff have returned from last year, and the program is led by head producer senior Alex Chan, section producers senior Abner Inzunza, junior Nicole Shadman and junior Jocelyn Takahashi, and associate producers junior Priyanka Arunkumar, junior Zara Sheikh and junior Talia Sisco, all of whom except for Takahashi were on the 2009-2010 staff.

Yet although there are many familiar faces in the Multimedia Journalism class, SHSTV’s second year has been largely affected by the new additions.
“We have new producers, a new website, and obviously, a new building,” said Palma. “We spent the first few months of school introducing and acclimating the staff members to the new MAP building, and we will continue to do this every year so that the building can be properly used.”

The new building, with its spectrum of media and technological tools, has opened many opportunities for SHSTV.

“We got three new studio cameras that allow us to do live shows, with anchors and interviews,” said Chan. “There are green screens everywhere, so we can do weather reports and anything else that might require it. Also, the recording studio gives us a place to record voice-overs.”

According to Chan, a newly designed version of SHSTV’s website, www.shstv.org, that will now include short biographies of the staff members will be up and running soon, and will have a live streaming feed that students, parents and teachers can watch at any time of day.

The staff of SHSTV is excited at the prospect of a successful year, where the program’s exposure can be increased and news in the form of multimedia can be spread to the entire school.