Hi there! We're the volunteer crew of The Hometown Hour, a monthly program on our local cable access channel. Seven of us, ages 17 to 74, none of us in the television business, all of us hooked. People keep asking how a bunch of amateurs get a show on TV, so we put this page together at Ted's kitchen table (Ted's the director; his kitchen has the biggest table). Everything you need to know to do it yourself is here, and the last section tells you how to walk in the door. Come on in. We need a camera operator for November.

Here's the part most people don't know. When a cable company wants to run its wires through a town, it needs a franchise agreement with the city. In return for the right to use the streets and poles, the city can ask for things, and one of the things federal law lets a city ask for is channels set aside for the public, for the schools and for the city government. That's the "PEG" channels: public, educational, government. The public one is public access. In our town it's Channel 18, the one between the weather radar and the shopping channel.

Under our franchise, the cable company also has to provide the studio, the equipment and the staff to train people. Which means: any resident can walk in, take a free workshop, and get free studio time and free equipment to make a television program that goes out on the cable to every house in town. No experience required. No charge. The catch is that it can't be commercial (no selling anything, no ads) and you're responsible for what's in it, the same way you're responsible for what you say on a soapbox in the park. The channel doesn't pick what's on. It's first-come, first-served, and the people who show up are the programming.

Some of what shows up: the city council meetings, the high school football game (taped, shown Sunday), a fellow who plays hymns on the organ, a Vietnamese-language news program, the bowling show, a woman who does chair exercises for seniors, two teenagers with a movie review show that's honestly pretty good, and us. It's the most local television there is. Nobody else is going to put your garden club on the air. This channel will.

One hour, once a month, taped in the studio on the second Saturday and cablecast four times over the following weeks (Tuesday and Thursday at 7 p.m., Sunday at 2, and once late at night for the insomniacs). We've done 30 shows since April 1997. The format has settled down to this:

Our audience? Honestly, we don't know. There are no ratings on Channel 18. What we know is that people stop Marge at the grocery store, that the shoe repair man got new customers, and that a woman wrote to say she'd been housebound after a hip operation and our show was the first time she'd seen the inside of the new library. That's enough.

It's a room about 30 by 40 feet in the back of the cable company's building, with a concrete floor painted gray, black curtains around three walls, and a grid of pipes on the ceiling that the lights hang from. There's a lighting grid with a couple dozen instruments: the ones with a lens that throw a hard beam, and the big scoop-shaped ones that throw a soft wash. The rule we learned in the workshop is three-point lighting: a key light on the subject from one side, a softer fill from the other side to take the edge off the shadows, and a back light from behind and above to separate the person from the curtain. Once you learn to see it you'll notice it on every news program for the rest of your life. Sorry about that.

Behind a window at one end is the control room: the switcher, the audio mixer, the character generator, a wall of small monitors (one for each camera, one for preview, one for program, one for the tape deck) and the tape decks themselves. The director (Ted) sits at the switcher. The audio person (Phil) sits at the mixer with the headphones. The CG operator (Arthur) types the names. Everybody in the control room can talk to the camera operators through their headsets; the camera operators can't talk back on the air, so they nod.

On the floor: three cameras, the desk set, the kitchen set, and a lot of cable. Sue is the floor director: she stands next to the camera that's on the air, relays Ted's instructions to the guests with hand signals (stretch, wrap it up, look at this camera, thirty seconds), and counts the show in and out. She is the only person in the studio who is allowed to point.

Three cameras is the classic setup for an interview show and here's why. Camera 1 sits on the left and gets a close shot of the guest. Camera 3 sits on the right and gets a close shot of the host. Camera 2, in the middle, holds the wide two-shot of both of them, and it's the one we cut to when we're in trouble, which is why Kevin has it. The director cuts between them as the conversation goes back and forth, and if it's done right nobody at home ever thinks about it.

The studio cameras are big, older units on wheeled pedestals with a viewfinder the size of a small TV. You steer with two handles on the back. The lens has a zoom rocker on one handle and focus on the other, and the trick is to zoom all the way in, focus, and zoom back out, so you're sharp at every size. Each camera has a red tally light on the front that comes on when that camera is on the air. Guests are told: talk to the host, not the camera, and if you must look at a camera, look at the one with the red light. Guests are also told not to look at the red light. Both instructions are ignored about equally.

What a camera operator actually does, minute to minute: keeps the shot framed (a little room above the head, eyes about a third of the way down), listens to Ted in the headset ("camera 1, tighten up a little"), doesn't move while the tally is on unless told to, and when the tally goes off, quietly gets the next shot ready. It's like being a good waiter. You notice everything and nobody notices you.

The switcher is the box with all the buttons that picks which picture goes out. Ours is a small one, nothing like what a network has, but it does what matters. There are two rows of buttons: the program row (what's on the air right now) and the preview row (what's up next). You punch up the next shot on preview, look at it on the preview monitor, and when you want it you either press TAKE for a hard cut or pull the T-bar lever for a dissolve. A few wipes for fun; we use the one that looks like a page turning when we go to the band. And a downstream key, which lays the character generator text (the guest's name in the lower third of the screen) over the picture without messing up the picture.

The director's job during the show is to call every shot out loud before it happens, so everyone's ready: "Ready two — take two. Ready one, tighten up on the guest — take one. Ready CG, key the name — key. Lose the key." It sounds like gibberish for about two shows and then it sounds like music. Ted talks this way at the dinner table now. Ted's wife has asked us to mention that.

The audio mixer is the other half of the control room. Each person on the set wears a little clip-on microphone, each one has a fader on the mixer, and Phil rides them up when someone talks and down when they don't, because an open mic on a quiet guest picks up the air conditioning, the cameras rolling on the concrete, and once, memorably, the guest's stomach. The music comes in on another fader. The tape deck records whatever leaves the mixer. If it's not on the mixer, it's not on the tape, no matter how loud it was in the room.

Everything here goes on tape, and there are two kinds in the building.

3/4-inch U-matic. The big cassettes, about the size of a hardcover book, in decks that weigh as much as a microwave. This was the workhorse format of local TV and cable access for twenty years and our studio still masters onto it: the show gets recorded on 3/4-inch from the switcher, and the playback decks that feed the channel run 3/4-inch. It's tough, it holds up through a lot of plays, and the picture is a step up from what you get at home. The cassettes come in 20-minute and 60-minute lengths, and a one-hour show fills a 60 to the last inch, which we have learned the hard way (see bloopers).

S-VHS. Super VHS. Same size cassette as the tape in your VCR at home, but the S-VHS tape and deck record a sharper picture than regular VHS, and the deck has a separate connector that keeps the color and brightness signals apart so the picture stays cleaner through editing. Our field camcorder shoots S-VHS, so the band segment and anything we tape outside the studio comes back on S-VHS and gets edited from there. One warning: an S-VHS recording won't play in a plain VHS machine at home. Regular VHS tapes play fine in the S-VHS deck, though, so if you want a copy of a show for your own VCR, we dub it down to plain VHS for you.

Editing happens in a little room next door on a cuts-only linear system: a source deck, a record deck, and a controller in between. You find your in point on the source, your in point on the record, and press the button, and it lays that piece down. Then you find the next piece. You can't insert something in the middle later without redoing everything after it, so you plan. Doreen keeps a paper log of every shot with the counter numbers, and Doreen is the reason we go home before midnight.

• The open mic. Show 4. Marge's mic stayed up during the break while she asked Ted, on the record, whether the guest's toupee was "a known thing." It was on the tape. It was cut from the tape. The guest was very gracious and we don't talk about it, except here.
• The 60-minute tape. Show 11. The show ran 61 minutes. The master tape does not run 61 minutes. Marge's good night is on a different tape and the edit is visible if you know where to look. Everybody knows where to look.
• The wrong red light. Show 16. A wiring mixup meant camera 2's tally light came on when camera 3 was on the air. Our guest, the retired judge, spent twenty minutes speaking with great dignity to a camera that was pointed at the coffee table.
• The canning segment. Show 19. Twelve minutes were budgeted. Water takes as long to boil as it takes. We learned that television does not speed up water.
• Sue's hand signals. A guest was given the "stretch" signal (pulling hands apart, meaning keep talking) and interpreted it as "bigger," and got louder, and then louder, and Sue kept signaling, and he kept going, and the tape is unbelievable.
• The trombone. Kevin taped the band from the field and forgot he was in it. There's a shot where the camera goes down, the ground goes by, and then it's marching. We used it. The band boosters gave it a standing ovation.
• The plant. For 22 shows there was a ficus behind the guest chair. On show 23 somebody moved it, and the mail asked where the plant went. The plant is back. The plant has fans.

To work on our crew: come to a taping. Second Saturday of the month, 9 a.m. call, studio at the cable company building on the frontage road. You'll start on cable-wrangling and the coffee, and by your second show you'll be on a camera during the calendar segment, when nothing can go wrong (something will go wrong). We need camera operators most, and we'd love a second host for a segment or two. Ages 16 and up; under 18 with a parent's signature.

To start your own show, here or anywhere:

1. Find out if your town's cable system has a public access channel. Call the cable company and ask for "community access" or "public access," or ask at city hall who handles the cable franchise. Most towns of any size have one and most people have never noticed it.
2. Ask about the producer workshop. Ours is four evening sessions: studio basics, cameras and lighting, control room, editing. Free. At the end you're a "certified producer," which means you can book the studio.
3. Sign the producer agreement. It says you won't sell anything, you own what you make and you're responsible for it, and you'll return the equipment in the condition you found it.
4. Book a studio slot. Bring friends; you need at least four people to run three cameras and a control room. Bring more than you think you need. Someone will not show.
5. Make a show. It'll be a little awkward. Make another one. By the third one you'll have a plant that people write in about.

There's a nice page here on GeoCities by a community theater group, the Riverside Community Players, and the whole business of putting on a show with volunteers is the same in a studio as on a stage: everybody has a job, nobody gets paid, and it's the best Saturday of the month. If your marching band wants to be on TV, ask your local channel; if it's ours, ask Kevin.