Summer Love in the City (Summer Instalove)

student, she was excited. “Years ago in TV production, there would be camera people to

shoot the content, a director to tell them exactly how to shoot it, a segment producer who

would gather the guests and host and topic and content, if it were a talk show, for example.

And then the producer would run the entire show.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“Yeah, it really was,” she said. “But now that people want constant, quick videos, a video

producer or content producer does almost everything themselves.”

“That sounds pretty stressful.”

“It can be.” She was absolutely grinning, so it looked like stress that she enjoyed. “My

company provides snippets of background footage that people can use as filler for live TV

broadcasts.”

I assumed my blank look told her that I needed more details.

“If the news is talking about…” She looked around the table. “The flower industry. Maybe

flower sales are booming in cities, and nonexistent in small towns. If this was hitting the

news tonight, their editor would need background footage for the story's voice over. They would need flowers, a clip of a person arranging flowers, and they’d need a storefront shot

for both a busy urban shop and a rural small town shop.”

&nbs

p; I nodded. “So you’re providing the pieces, and they put it together at the last minute before

it goes on the air?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re making a library of video pieces?”

“Sort of,” she smiled. “We have huge libraries of content, and we’re adding to our archive all

the time. But we also have a bunch of clients who are currently working on stories a couple

of days, or even weeks ahead, who are looking for something in particular. So we shoot

twice the amount of content we think they’ll need, send it to them in low resolution, they pick

and choose, then we send them the final, polished clips.”

“So what do you actually do?” I asked again.

The way she wrapped her dark pink lips around the straw as she took the last sip of our

blue pineapple monstrosity almost distracted me.

“Right now, I go out and shoot clips for the archive,” she said. “But I’m hoping to shoot