guest appearance on “the lab with leo”
A rare opportunity presented itself last Thursday, as I was invited to do a guest spot on The Lab With Leo, hosted by none other than Leo Laporte. I have to admit that I was unaware of Mr. Laporte’s reputation until I received the invite to do the show, but after going through the whole process from invitation, to preparation, to actual filming, I have to say it was quite enjoyable, and Leo’s team is excellent to work with. I even managed to sneak in a few photos of the set while I was there.
The topic I was asked to discuss with Leo was “Getting Started with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)”, for which I prepared some basic slides as well as a walkthrough of how to implement the TabView control with some minor customization. It appears they found me via the TabView tutorial that I posted a few weeks back. Interestingly, the episode I filmed isn’t scheduled to air until January 2008 on G4techTV (which translates into a Shaw Digital Cable channel in greater Vancouver). As I understood it, the crew at the Lab With Leo film three to four episodes a day, so getting 15-20 episodes filmed in a one-week span appears to be commonplace. To a layman when it comes to the television industry, at a glance that looks like a helluva lot of work. :)
It was definitely an eye-opener to see all the work involved in filming a tech TV show firsthand. Strangely, I was sitting on set for most of the time they were filming, just out of the camera’s field of view. Had I decided to randomly start screaming or running around aimlessly, I’d probably have ended up in the middle of a shot. Wearing make-up was a first (well, at least in public), though it wasn’t as bad as I expected. The whole feeling of sitting five feet away from someone who’s on camera is mildly disturbing, yet you get an excellent view of what’s going on. When I was actually on camera, time passed so quickly in my conversation with Leo that I only covered about half of the materials I had prepared. It’s definitely a surreal feeling watching yourself on a television monitor while sitting in front of a camera, but it didn’t feel as staged as I thought it would. Leo’s brief conversations with me between filming segments of the show helped him get a better idea of the way our conversation would flow, and in the end I was quite impressed with how he guided the discussion and got to most, if not all, of the salient points.
All things considered, I had fun for the brief time I was there (”a lot of hurry up and wait,” to quote Chase Producer Ryan Yewell, as I spent about two-and-a-half hours on set for five minutes on air with Leo.) I’ve been invited back again in December to chat with Leo about the different AJAX frameworks available (e.g. YUI, Scriptaculous/Prototype, moo.fx, Dojo, Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX, et al.), and to compare and contrast them. Thankfully I won’t be as nervous next time (though it really wasn’t too bad this time), but I know a little better what to prepare. I’ll be posting the Google Video link to my first segment as soon as I get it from the producer, so watch for it soon. :)
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.