I Survived My CBC TV Interview

My CBC TV interview happened today, and it was an interesting experience. The whole thing lasted nearly two hours, all for a segment that will run 2 minutes. Not all of that was on-camera mind you – one of the things I helped the reporter with was to shoot two short promo pieces, shown below.

[Not sure what happened with my camera’s white balance above – the video below is much warmer in tone.]

[Note the incredulous tone in her voice – the angle of the story is that these unboxing videos are kind of strange and quirky, and who watches them anyway? I think I explain their purpose quite well…but we’ll see how it comes out post-edit.]

I filmed her doing the promos on my Canon HD camera, then edited them and uploaded them to YouTube (in private mode). Then she took her big expensive pro camera and filmed the video clips playing on my computer screen on the YouTube page. It should make for an interesting visual! I thought I’d share the two promo pieces here because I think it’s cool how she has that “news voice” – it makes me sound way cooler than I really am. Hah! The “one million views” she’s referring to is my total number of video views, as reported by TubeMogul. It’s a total number of all the video views across all the video sites that I upload to (about 12 of them). 99% of the views come from YouTube though.

The story will be shown on CBC Calgary, Monday the 19th, at 6pm – that’s channel six in Calgary. I haven’t seen how it turned out yet, so I’ll be watching it hoping that I didn’t come across as a complete idiot or shifty-eyed-home-office-dweller. I was nervous about it at first, but I eventually started to enjoy myself – the reporter was quite friendly and was very low-pressure. HP and Buzzcorps will be happy because the flashy geek gadget I used for most of the shots was the Vivienne Tam Edition HP Mini 1000 they sent a couple of weeks ago for Ashley to check out. Nothing like some free press for a product that’s going to be coming out in Canada soon, right?