Day 3: Can You Hear Me Now?

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

Today marks the end of my third day here in Denver covering the DNC as a floor runner, and it's been a great time so far. I had to arrive at the office a little earlier today at about 8:30 and I won't lie, I did consider just hopping on the light rail and taking a free ride, but I decided against it for obvious reasons. Once I got to the office, I was met by several new interns who had just arrived in town, many of them being members of the Washington Center program that works with universities to get students out and involved in political events. I was really the only one my age that wasn't part of the program, but because I already know the area, I kinda became the educator of the new interns. I felt pretty slick, but I realized that being a head intern is like being the MVP of the minor leagues.

CNN is having two RC personnel (roaming cameramen) on the floor at all times throughout the festivities here, and so because of that, they need two floor runners on duty at all times. Yours truly is one of them, but I met the other one today named Dan. He had no idea he was going to be a floor runner, so I was able to explain to him the awesomeness of our situation. I choose awesomeness as my way of describing it because I'm unable to find any other word in the English language that supports how sweet this gig is. Seriously, everyday when I go to work, I'm excited.

After showing some of the interns the area, I gave a tour to the senior librarian for CNN, I dunno what she does, but I showed her around the convention center pointing where our cameras were, and where the suites were located. I felt pretty cool because she was asking me all these questions about the premises and I was actually able to help. After the tour was finished, I was able to experience one of the coolest things CNN has to offer. The magic wall.

We were waiting to have myself and some others sit-in to test the lighting and the sound for the anchor platform, but it was taking longer than expected, so a guy I have become friends with called me over to the magic wall. The magic wall is the huge iPhone screen thing predominantly used by our analyst John King to point out voting tendencies and past election statistics. But anyway, he called me over and said "here, play with this and have as much fun as you can. I want to see if you can crash it." Basically he wanted to test the system to see if there was any way the system would crash if you gave it too much to handle. Needless to say, I was stoked.

He showed me how to work the thing, and then I went to town. I was able to look at each state, and then break them down by counties, and then look at the voting of each area, and it's correlation to density population. You can draw all over the thing with your fingers, and the screen is capable of reading over 100,000 touch points, so really we could have the entire CNN staff touching the screen, and the wall would still work. It was awesome. Right as I was finishing, some other interns came over and wanted to look at it, so Josh (the magic wall engineer) had me show them how it worked and I got to play on it some more. It seems that people are going to think I actually know stuff after all these "lessons" I've been giving.

After wall time, I sat in where the anchors will be (Wolf, John King, Anderson, Gloria) and we tested the sound and the sync by pretending to be anchors and communicating with each other within the convention center, all while talking back and forth with the directors in New York City. It might sound dull, but it was awesome. We then did some rehearsal work and checked up on the camera locations for a couple hours, and then it was time to call it a day.

Tomorrow I have to be at the office at 4am because we're shooting American Morning, CNN's morning show, from the platform or least some segment of the show will be at the platform. It airs at 6am EST so if you'll be up, check it out, cuz if it's a shot of the convention floor, I'm gonna be right there either behind the camera or in the background moving around with another cameraman. Remember... CNN = Politcs. Talk to ya tomorrow.