Fandom High School

"Well, guys, it's our last class," Dana said once the bell had rung. The room was arranged in the studio setup, the equipment was out and ready, and Dana was all set to see how they did. "You've all listened and done the work and really that's all a teacher can ask for, aside from you doing the work well. Which, to be fair, you've all done, or at least no one's screwed up so bad that I noticed, which is something to be praised in itself. It's been a pleasure, hopefully you've learned something, now go make your show."

When the bell rang, Dana took one look at her class and said, "No one is actually thinking even the tiniest bit about school today, huh?

"I'm going to forgive it this time," she decided, passing around a piece of paper for the kids to sign. "These are your sign ups for the final. The job descriptions and expectations are listed there, put your name next to what you want to do, and tah dah. If you don't sign up for something, or if more than one person signs up for more than one thing, I'll be the deciding factor there, so choose wisely, young ones. Once you've done that, you can go, or you can put your head down on your desk and sleep, or," she said, patting the TV, "you can stay and watch cartoons. Glorious, mindless cartoons."

Dana smiled as the bell rang and she closed the door today. "You have no idea how glad I am to have you all in class and find out nothing happened over the weekend. No one was flying around, no one was five... It's refreshing, you know?" No, she didn't mean that. She could care less about her students' love lives or anything but hearing embarrassing stuff like that was totally her entertainment.

"Anyway, today we're going to be working on editing. Over the last couple weeks we've been gathering footage, and today you're going to learn how to put it all together." She gave a quick rundown of how the equipment worked despite the lack of Wiki page, damn you Wiki!, and said, "You're going to be working with the footage you shot the other week and your screen tests, seeing what you can do with it. I'm not asking for it to be perfect, I'm just pretty much asking if you can splice together two things to make one thing, and I'll smile at you later if you do so and make it make sense."

Dana didn't worry about things like hellos this week. She'd lost an hour and was still paying for it. 'Hello' could suck it, her extra words saved were her way of getting some time back. "Last week I gave you all cameras? I hope you used them, and moreso I hope you brought them back."

Once the footage had been handed in, Dana let everyone reload with new tapes and said, "And today what we're going to be directing. You should all probably know what that is. The director is the one who gets the pretty credit where everyone goes 'Oh, he or she is the person who put this all together.' Now, you're going to find that there are really different types of directors. A television director has different responsibilities than someone who works on film who is different than someone who works on stage. Even in TV, live television is going to be different than filming a sitcom. And even when you're filming a sitcom, things change depending on whether you use a live audience or not, and I'm so glad you can't tell when they do that because I don't need a laugh track, I know when to laugh, thanks. Or maybe they still do it and I just haven't cared. Whichever.

What you're going to be doing is filming each other. It's very simple. You may have even gotten practice at it last week. You're going to point a camera and practice bossing each other around. This is something an episodic television show director does more than someone who's doing a sports show, but we're going to be dealing with our stuff more later anyway and I'm sure most of you already have ideas in your head of what you think you should do so let's get that out of your systems. One person will talk. It doesn't matter what you recite; you can write your own, you can choose a monologue from one of these books up here at my desk... I don't care what you say, that's not the point. Whoever's directing is going to be telling you how to stand, make sure you're in frame, keep others out of the shots if you don't want them there, and make sure things look the way you want them to, along with making sure the person who's talking at you cooperates. Which is usually the hardest part, so have fun with that."

"I'm assuming no one had anything embarrassing happen to them this weekend," Dana greeted the class as she stood in front of her desk. "Disappointing. Anyway, it means we get to talk shop sooner. Aren't you all happy.

"Shows are different, depending on where you're working. Some of them have writers who will shove papers in front of you and you sit in front of a camera and read the news all pretty without having any idea what you're talking about," she went on. "The newscasters who actually have a clue and any real credibility write their own stuff. And absolutely no news ever- be it sports, political, entertainment, whatever- has the same news all the time. If you watch CNN, the coverage is different than it was this time even a month ago. That stupid Ryan Seacrest thing on E! has new stuff to talk about every day. You can be watching the local news and they'll interrupt for breaking news that just popped up right now. This is a good thing. You'd get bored watching the same thing all the time anyway.

"In sports, the news goes along with the seasons. With the Super Bowl, we've finished football and are moving on to baseball's spring training, and to basketball. As seasons end and approach, you start hearing about deals and trades that are being made on the teams. Last summer we had the Olympics, which took over everything. But there's always a good mix of stuff going on.

"What you're going to be doing today is writing your own story. I'm not asking for a huge long essay. No, all I want is a quick little headline, something you'd read on the news to summarize what happened. Like 'So and so was traded from this team to this team for the amount of two bazillion dollars', or 'The Pretentiously-Named-Team beat the Non-Pretentiously-Named-Team in basketball today by a score of 312 to 51.' Yes, I just made those up right now. If you want to quote someone, great. We like quotes. Just don't plagiarize the info you've given to work with. Do your best, present them at the end of class. Yes, kids, you're reading aloud today. Had to make up for going easy last week."

"Morning!" Dana greeted the class, looking almost chipper. "There's a paper on your desks. If you write your name on it with the name of the team that won the Super Bowl, you get free extra credit. Did anyone watch? Anyone win any money? Because I won money. Don't gamble, kids, it's wrong and immoral but damn it's fun when you win.

"Anyway," she said, smile fading just a little bit, and wasn't happy Dana a little terrifying? "Last week I sent you all on errands to show you a little bit of what the life of the production assistant is like. Today we're going to work on research. Again, it's high-pressure. People will be throwing names and dates at you and you have to come up with information on them like that. You're not expected to know everything. However, you are expected to be able to find it.

"In a situation like a sports show, you'd have archival footage to go through, too. Since we don't really have that here, we're just going to keep it simple. You have assignments. You have till the end of class to get me as much information on your subject as possible. You can go to the library, you can use the computer lab, anything else you probably don't have time for. You don't even need to write me up a report on the person, but I want to be able to kill a few trees with all the info you give me at the end of class. We're going to be very bad to the environment today. Skip a shower tomorrow, it will completely make up for it." She could say that because she didn't have any of them in a class tomorrow.

As soon as everyone was seated, Dana started with, "Anyone who cops to calling me yesterday gets detention. Don't be that stupid. Now that we have that out of the way, this week we're going to be discussing what kind of show you want to do.

( class is this way )

As the last student walked into the classroom, Dana greeted them all with a smile and said in a voice that was just quick enough to make you realize that you were going to have to work to keep up with her, "So you're here. You made it. If you're not supposed to be in So You Want To Make a TV Show you have one of two choices. One, you can slip quietly out the door and we'll pretend never to speak of this again while we really snicker behind your back after you leave, or two, you can pretend you're really supposed to be here and just not show up next week, which is the safe bet since I'm not paying enough attention to remember your names yet anyway.

( first class! )