My second internship was based on a completely different framework. I was not to produce any headline content for daily publishing on web videos. What Telemundo does, is to produce entertaining newscasts with extraordinary, curious, sensationalist stories around Latin America. And I was not to videotape events nor to interview the people involved, but only to watch an expert do it and learn from it, and later, edit the packages.
I felt such a difference. Samuel Arias has over twenty years of working with international networks. He has a production plan pre-approved by his boss in Los Angeles. When a production plan is approved, he schedules interviews and video shoots. He must script the package under a determined layout, a format he dominates perfectly. He has a style-book as guidance. He supervises every step of the production, and is very demanding in the post-production; I was pushed to be more creative in my editing, using logical sequences of shots almost every time. I finally felt I had a boss.
I learned to use international Spanish: cleaning my language of regional idioms and getting rid of my accented Spanish so that anybody from any Hispanic country could understand my comments.
Samuel Arias was very thoughtful as an instructor; he would explain all the tools of the editing program, every step on the production plan writing, every detail to be taken care of in the means of delivering a satisfactory product to the buying agencies. He would explain the reasons after every decision and recognize the job and initiative of everybody in the office. He was very strict of a boss, yet very aware of the capacity of his employees. And I really appreciated this.
Working with Telemundo also opened me the doors to a TV network in El Salvador, Grupo Megavision. So every Monday and Thursday I got to hang out at the TV station and be there during the evening newscast live broadcast. I got the chance to interact with nationally well-known news anchors, producers, and reporters. I had the opportunity to expand my network, and I took it.
I was grateful that I went from standing all day outside Forensics to get the images and the stories of those mourning their relatives, to go meet the family who found a Virgin in a beehive or the boy with no arms working as a carpenter to make a living.
The one thing I did not appreciate much of working with Telemundo was the sensationalism. Every day we were to produce a package for a very “yellow” show for Estrella TV. Sometimes it would be the same story we worked on for presenting at a national level, or for the newscast of the same international network, but we would have to exaggerate the story punch lines in the script and choose the most explicit images we got. I learned then how to make a crime scene bloodier, a sad story more miserable, how to turn a motivational story into a feeling of pity.
Now... we shall call things by their name. What is this then? Is it news, or simply costume-masked entertainment?
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