Tag: art director

I’ve Got Antlers

It was really cold today – bitterly cold. Sometimes mentioning the wind chill factor is nothing more than hype. Today, you could feel every biting degree.

Sure, I hate the cold, but there’s an upside. It finally feels like we’re in the Christmas season, which is good.

Though we don’t observe Christmas, we enjoy participating in everyone else’s fun. Everyone seems to be in a good mood.

A few nights ago, Ann Nyberg, one of our news anchors, mentioned she’d seen a car with a big red nose and antlers! We all got a kick out of it.

Later, on the 11:00 PM news, Chris Kirby – our art director, fashioned an ‘artist’s rendering’ of what the car might have looked like… especially as the featured vehicle on MTV’s “Pimp My Sleigh Ride.”

Flash forward to today. Ann returned to her desk to find an antler/nose kit sitting there. She looked puzzled.

I told her, if she didn’t want it, I surely did. And so, my car now has antlers. They’re fitted with little plastic brackets that fit over the top edge of a car’s windows. It’s hysterical.

I will install the nose when it’s warmer… like in the garage at home.

It’s Emmy Time in New England

The Boston/New England Chapter of NATAS has their Emmy big nomination party listed on their website for tonight, April 5th. It’s the first night of Passover, so it seemed a strange time to have a party… and I was right. This afternoon I got an email telling me the celebration is tomorrow (when many people also have Passover Seders).

Either way, I’m already in worry mode. I have foolishly set myself up for disaster. Normally, I sour on my tape as the postman is taking it away. Not so this year.

The tape opens with a phenomenal animation by Chris Kirby, our art director. I told him what I wanted and he exceeded any possible expectation. With it, I was able to explain a strange weather event, with only a trace of frozen precipitation, that had half the state in traffic for hours.

Chris deserves the credit, but as the judges watched the tape, hopefully it reflected well on me. That’s my perception based on my judging experience of last summer.

See – I am setting myself up for disaster.

Helaine has already told me (and this is not the first time), if I’m nominated, she’s not going. The past few times, I didn’t either. The ceremony is very long. The chapter covers a huge geographic area – so many of us don’t even know the other nominees. With weather toward the tail end, it’s a tedious evening at best. And, odds are, most nights you get nothing for your wait.

I have been exceptionally lucky, winning 7 Emmys over the years. On a few occasions, I thought my winning tape was awful. I have won and then not even been nominated the next year. It’s a crap shoot, decided by strangers in a strange city, often enticed by nothing more than free pizza!

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.