It’s amazing what you can do with an ipad! Last Saturday’s Mardi Gras broadcast was presented by the unflappable Mark Trevorrow and myself with the help of a autocue operator using his ipad. He was scrolling down the text with his finger all night!
The intro was a particularly interesting adventure in improvisation given that we didn’t have a rehearsal and weren’t given one iota of direction. The rain then froze the ipad that the poor soul was trying to hold under the camera as it was whirling around on a giant crane in Taylor Square.
Luckily the subsequent parade narration was done under a tent because we hadn’t even seen the script and didn’t have a clue as to what was going on (if I had I would’ve changed the tense from future to present – not that any of the changes I made to the intro and outro made it onto the auto cue anyway!).
Just as well we’ve got decades of experience under our belts because we gave it a whirl and ended up with only a little bit of egg dribbling down our faces.
Note to Mardi Gras; please protect your event by making sure that your community broadcast hosts are given some heads about about what the f**k is going on. Surely that’s not too big an ask?