The News 3 weather team assembled Monday afternoon to shoot our newest weather promotional commercial (promo) highlighting the 2008 hurricane season which began June 1.

The entire shoot, which lasted for approximately two hours, consisted of planning the necessary shots and backgrounds, setting up the equipment, rehearsing scripts and movements, and the actual shoot itself.

While you see a thirty second, smooth promo, the actual shoot is fairly complex and takes a lot longer!  Each individual talent (in this case, weathercaster) puts on a microphone (one at a time) and records all of his lines at once. While chief meteorologist Bob French had a line at the beginning and end of this particular commercial, he gave all of his lines and recorded all of his shots at the same time.

He would then take off his microphone and hand it to the next talent (or weather anchor) to read and record.  This process takes place for each individual weather anchor and we usually repeat our lines several times and choose from the best one (i.e. take one, take two, etc.).

Since each individual records his lines at once, you would think that one would be dismissed after he's done, but that's not the case!  Since the recording sessions are broken up based on our lines instead of the order of shots, we all have to keep our places in the background for each individual take of each segment. In other words, if I'm standing next to Bob while I'm reading my lines, I'll have to stay next to Bob when he starts reading so the shot looks the same.  Confusing huh? 

Despite the complexity of the process, it's usually a lot of fun. Once all the segments are recorded our promotions manager, Cliff Wallace, goes to work by meshing all the pieces together, adding some background music, and sending it to master control to be put into rotation.