This was my first attempt at a studio production. The Public Access studio was a place where I could use professional equipment, but the intent was to produce content to be broadcast over their cable channel. I had good chemistry with my collaborator of the aircraft documentary, and he agreed to be my counterpart on a talk show series.

I had recently gotten into Formula 1 racing, and I was very enthusiastic about it. My counterpart didn't share my level of zeal, but he did watch the races and could converse intelligently on it. We decided that this would be the subject matter for the show. Another friend had taken the Public Access training at the same time that I did, and could run things in the control booth.

This wound up being a learning experience. I learned very quickly the effort involved in setting up the stage. The cameras were no big deal. I put one on me, one on him, and one on the both of us, and just left them that way. The audio was also easy because we just clipped on lavaliere microphones and set the levels. The biggest trick was the lighting. Setting up lighting is complicated matter. There's a whole science to it. It's no wonder they have "engineers" whose sole job it is to do the lighting for productions. Not only did I have to decide on how we should be lit, every damn time we went into the studio I had to climb up on this high ladder to configure the lights way up in the lighting grid. It was a big pain in the ass.

The other thing I had to do was to put together slates to be used to list stats about each race and the championship. Composing the graphics in Photoshop was bad enough, but I had to dump them down to video tape so that they could be accessible in the control room. The Public Access studio didn't have a way to do this, so I had to use a multi-media lab that was available to me through my day job at Cornell University. It was a big hassle to hike across campus every time, and I needed the attendant to reconfigure the workstation so I could output to video tape instead of record from it like everyone else did.

This was all good practice in producing a series in the studio, but it was just too much work for too little payoff. Frankly, the show wasn't that good, and I was pretty sure no one was watching anyway. I had intended to cover the entire F1 season, but we called it quits after only 6 episodes.