[BC] TV weather

[Davis, Jack L. KTXL]

Heck, some of them could even write backwards onto glass that was
between them and the camera, with the local area maps etched onto the
glass.  Don Kent of WBZ-TV/Boston used to do that.  Others, like Tex
Antoine of WABC-TV/New York, used to draw cartoons during the weather
forecast.


Sometimes this was actually a trick.  In the black and white days we
installed a DPDT switch on the camera head to reverse the scan to the pickup
tube.  The scan would be right to left and the weather man would stand
behind the map and write normally and the viewer would see the writing
correctly.  Our weather man was a dumb as a box of rocks yet most of the
viewers thought he was brilliant to be able to write backwards.  We shot the
weather set close up so there were no other points of reference in the
frame.  

Every now and then the director would forget to tell the camera man to
switch the deflection back and the news set would be backward until he
reached around the side and switched it to normal. It looked strange to see
everything swap sides instantly when he flipped it back to normal.  

We also used little symbols of clouds, the sun and tornados that had some
polarized light reflective material on them.  There was a key light up on
the lighting grid that had a motorized filter rotating in front of it that
shined on the map.  The clouds would have raindrops coming out of them, the
sun rays would radiate out from the center and the tornado would spin.  It
was actually really cool: long before the weather graphics came from a
computer.

Jack Davis
K6YC