Congratulations, 2014 Emmy� nominees, on behalf of the 43rd Annual Northern California Emmy� Awards Gala Committee!!  

       This year's Gala, sponsored by Steve Padis Jewelry featuring the Forevermark Diamond, promises to be one of the best ever.

       Festivities begin at 6 p.m. with a fabulous Emmy� Pre-Show Reception at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.  

       The reception will feature a Domaine Chandon Bubbly Bar, Cash Bar, and Complimentary Wine tasting courtesy of Lambert Bridge Winery.

       The Emmy� Awards presentation begins at 7 p.m. During the show, guests will enjoy a four-course meal served with a 2006 Lambert Bridge Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon and a Cooper Garrod Chardonnay.

       This year's Emmy� presenters represent some of the best in the business, from all facets of our industry, including news, new media, sports and management. 

       Presenters this year are Wayne Freedman and Leyla Gulen, KGO-TV ABC7; Brian Hackney and Mike Sugerman, KPIX 5; Vicky Nguyen and Matt Goldberg, KNTV NBC Bay Area; Anny Hong, KRON 4; George Takata, KSEE 24; Kellie DeMarco and Lori Waldon, KCRA 3; Flavio Lacayo, KDTV Univision 14; David Feldman, Comcast SportsNet; Kym McNicholas, Kymerview; Colleen Taylor, Tech Crunch; Rob Stewart, KVIE 6; and Thuy Vu, KQED 9.

       Sara Sidner, formerly of KTVU and now with CNN, will present for Rita Williams, the retired, veteran KTVU reporter who will receive this year's Governors' Award. 

       Vincent Huergas and Talia Marisa Samelian, this year's Mr. & Ms. Emmy, are rising stars in the industry, and recent NATAS Scholarship recipients.

 

       After accepting their award on stage, recipients will be escorted to the Emmy� Red Carpet, where they will receive their engraved statuette, pose for an official Emmy� photo, and stop for a live interview with this year's Red Carpet Co-Hosts, Kevin Wing of ABC News/Good Morning America and Kim Stephens of KMPH.

 

       The Red Carpet interviews are part of a first of its kind NATAS Emmy� LIVE Dual Webcast featuring simultaneous onstage and red carpet programs. Each of the interviews and on-stage acceptance speeches will also be sub-clipped and available for sharing on social media courtesy of the NATAS Webcast Sponsor, Anvato. 

       The 2014 Emmy� presenters and red carpet hosts will be dripping in Forevermark Diamonds, courtesy of Steve Padis Jewelry. Padis is among a select group of elite jewelers chosen by De Beers to sell its exclusive Forevermark Diamonds.  Each diamond comes with a promise, that it is beautiful, rare, and responsibly sourced. 

 

 

       Congratulations 2014 Emmy� nominees!

       Before you start planning your acceptance speeches, we would like to remind you of the procedural changes introduced last year.

       DESIGNATED SPOKESPERSON: No matter how many people are named on your entry, only one pre-designated spokesperson will be allowed to speak onstage on behalf of your entry, should it win.  All of the nominees on the entry are invited to join the spokesperson on stage and receive their EMMY� statuette.  If you haven't already, please immediately email the name of your entry's spokesperson to Darryl@emmysf.tv.

       NO SPOKESPERSON: If no spokesperson was pre-designated by May 30th, no on-stage speech will be given.  If the pre-designated spokesperson does not attend the gala, no on-stage speech will be given.  If there is no spokesperson in a category, the presenters will announce the winning entry and move on to the next category.  The award recipients in that category will proceed directly to the reception area to collect their Emmy� statuette.

        ONE SPEECH PER NOMINEE: Each spokesperson will be invited to give only one on-stage speech regardless of the number of awards they receive.  You may submit your name to speak on behalf of as many entries as you are nominated, but after you give your first on-stage speech (regardless of the category) the microphone will be cut when you walk onstage to accept your remaining awards.

       Regardless of the number of nominees on those entries, no speech will be made if the designated spokesperson has already given an onstage speech.  However, all of the nominees are invited to accept their statuettes onstage. If you haven't already, please email the pronunciations for each name on your entry to Darryl@emmysf.tv.

       30-SECOND SPEECHES: A strict 30-second time limit for on-stage speeches will be adhered to this year, but not to worry...  

      BACKSTAGE SPEECHES: Thanks to our live red carpet webcast, everyone will have the opportunity to thank Mom, Dad, Susie the Intern, Fido and anyone else they didn't get to thank on stage.  Everyone nominated on a winning entry (including the spokesperson) will be invited to give a speech on the red carpet backstage.  As in the on-stage speeches, these red carpet speeches will be webcast live and archived for re-posting on social media, texting, tweeting, embedding, emailing and sharing with anyone and everyone in your life. 

 

      This year, SpeakingPhoto, the app that lets you turn pictures into stories, will be capturing that moment like never before.

      Each recipient will be photographed immediately after walking backstage, and asked to describe their experience (in 30 seconds or less).  The moments will be instantly uploaded to the first-ever awards show SpeakingPhoto Gallery - hosted on the NATAS homepage www.emmysf.tv

      Your special moments will be available for re-posting on social media, texting, emailing, tweeting, embedding and otherwise sharing. SpeakingPhoto can be downloaded for free from iTunes and Google Play.

 

 


 

 

       It's that time again! June 26 is San Francisco's production event of the year - Project Reboot, organized by Beyond Pix Studios.  Only here will you find an open-house, pub-like crawl, trade show, and house party all rolled into one glorious afternoon/evening.  It's so huge, it comes in two parts: a Production Crawl, followed by SOMA-Palooza. 

      The Production Crawl is your chance to peek behind the curtains at some of San Francisco's top production companies.  As you wind your way down through the open houses, you can see the workspace and systems of some of the city's best post-production companies, the studios of professional audio recorders and mixers, the best-equipped professional soundstages, and the top-of-the-line equipment available for rent.  There's so much to see, we couldn't fit it all in the crawl, so you'll have to come down to Beyond Pix's @Bayshore studio (fortuitously enough, SOMA-Palooza is happening there), where everything from drone cameras to high-end lighting to post-production software will be on display.

     And then, there's the party ...

     You come for the production crawl.  You stay for the barbeque.  And the prizes!  While you groove to DJ Timoteo Gigante, sipping on Kendall-Jackson's wine or drinking LaCroix, you even have the chance to win stuff.  What kind of stuff, you ask?  Well, if you're creative, saucy, and clever enough, you could win a brand new Apple iPad mini by submitting the best Vine to our Vine Video Challenge.  Or if you drop a business card in our fishbowl, you could win two Giants tickets.  Or if you collected raffle tickets on the way down from the production crawl, you could win a Nespresso Pixie Machine, a Peet's Gift Basket, a one-day studio rental, or a bunch of other fun swag. 

    So, to recap, you have the opportunity to see the best in Bay Area production, to win prizes, dance, eat, drink, and party your socks off, and to network with production professionals.  But not only that, any donations collected onsite will be donated to Movie Making Throughout the Bay, a local non-profit that brings together filmmakers and aspiring filmmakers to practice their craft.  So you can do some good for the production community, too!  So let's pull it together and get ready to Reboot our industry! 

Beyond Pix Studios @Bayshore 

 

 

By Steve Shlisky

Chapter Education Chairperson

 

     The submission deadline for the Chapter's scholarships submissions is approaching. This year, seven awards, totaling $16,000, are up for grabs by talented area college students.

     And, two of last year's recipients are looking at transitioning from college to broadcast careers.

      Since receiving the $2,000 Shelly Fay Videography Scholarship last year, Vincent Huergas has seen an immense improvement in his work. 

      "The work that I currently produce is on another level and numerous opportunities have opened as a result," Huergas says. 

      The award has opened doors for Huergas, giving him confidence to seek work on professional productions.

      "Academically, the prestige from this award has earned me the respect from other students and faculty within my program at San Francisco State," he adds. Huergas aspires to become an established director or director of photography in the production and film industry.

      Talia Samelian just received her undergraduate degree in May. Since winning the $3,000 Steve Davis Memorial Scholarship, she was chosen as the departmental honoree for San Francisco's State University's Broadcast and Communication Arts and was the undergraduate speaker at its department graduation ceremony. 

      This month, Samelian begins her cross-country journey to hand-deliver her resume reel to news directors in various markets. 

      "I am so incredibly passionate about becoming a news reporter and I look forward to the day I receive my first job offer," Samelian says. 

      Keep Samelian and Huergas in your sights if you're attending the 43rd Annual Emmy Awards Gala in San Francisco June 14. In their roles as "Ms. Emmy" and "Mr. Emmy" at the event, both will be onstage handing out Emmy statuettes to recipients.

      Some recipients are well on their way to establishing a name for themselves.

      In 2011, Rebecca Friedman received the "Miss Nancy" Besst Graduate Scholarship. Since then, she has graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. Friedman's $2,000 award allowed her to focus on her master's thesis film Past Their Prime, a short documentary film about geriatric zoo animal care, as seen through the story of Colo, the oldest living gorilla in captivity, on the primate's 55th birthday. This film has won many national honors, including the 2013 NATAS Student Emmy Award. 

     Friedman's professional career appears to be taking off. Since graduating, she began working full-time at Pixar as a production assistant, and is now a contract production coordinator at Disney Interactive/LucasFilm in San Francisco.

     Just after receiving the $3,000 Steve Davis Scholarship, Mario Ayala was honored with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California for the best Student Project for his reports about the San Bruno pipeline fire. It is a project he shot and edited. 

     "Both the Steve Davis Scholarship and the Society of Professional Journalists are great stimulus to be better and set higher goals," Ayala says. "I hope one day I will be a professional TV producer and have the opportunity to help others and give back to the community."

     Paul Meyers will receive his master's degree from Stanford University this month. His feature thesis is about insects and the way people relate to them in the Western world. Meyers says he narrates the film and shares his own personal experiences.

     "While encountering various subjects who have different relationships with insects, including a bio-engineering student, an exterminator, and an entomophagy (insect-eating!) advocate," Meyers says.

     The $3,000 Jerry Jensen Graduate Scholarship went to underwrite the archival costs as well as the animation budget, both of which were essential to the project. 

  

Here is a list of this year's awards:

 

$2,000 awards:

The Peter J. Marino Jr. Award, recognizing production;

The Sheldon "Shelly" Fay Award, recognizing videography;

The Rigo Chacon Reporting Scholarship;

The Kenneth Sloat Langly Award, recognizing writing;

The "Miss Nancy" Besst Award, recognizing a graduate production student.

 

$3,000 awards:

The Steve Davis Memorial Award, for an outstanding graduate student;

The Jerry Jensen Memorial Award, for the outstanding graduate student.

 

     Scholarship applicants must be actively engaged in a collegiate-level curriculum in one or more areas of the television industry. They must attend a college in northern California (Visalia to the Oregon border), Hawaii, or Reno.

     All entrants must submit a sample of their work, their transcripts, an essay, and a letter of recommendation from their professor or dean. All entries are screened by a panel of judges culled from the NATAS Education Committee. The Committee meets to decide the recipient in each category. The Committee can award or not award a scholarship for each category. More details and an application can be found here: http://emmysf.tv/scholarships.html

 

  

     The Corporation for Public Broadcasting's vice president for station grants and system development has joined the management team at KQED in San Francisco.

      Kevin Martin joined KQED in May. At the same time, KQED bumped up Michael Isip, vice president, television to senior vice president and chief content officer. 

     The appointments were effective May 5. 

New Management Team At KQED From left to right, Kevin Martin, John Boland and Michael Isip.

     "KQED is in a period of dramatic change and growth as we transform the organization to meet the rapidly changing needs of the people of the Bay Area, both in terms of new media technology and increased regional coverage, says John Boland, KQED president. "I believe we've established the right structure with two senior executives leading the implementation of our 21st-century strategy, and I have great confidence that we've selected the right leaders in Kevin Martin and Michael Isip."

     "KQED is one of the few public media providers in the nation moving aggressively toward a digital future," Martin says. "I'm excited to join a team of world-class professionals to help the organization reach its goals and maintain its exemplary status as a public media leader."

     "I am excited to take on this new position to help re-imagine the way KQED produces, distributes and curates content to better meet the needs of our audience in today's fast-changing media climate," Isip says. "I look forward to building and leading a new public media model, where multi-platform units innovate across television, radio and digital."

 

 

         The San Francisco/Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences took home three awards at the 2013-14 San Francisco Peninsula Press Club's 37th Annual Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards.

         Recipients of the annual journalism competition were presented with their honors at an awards dinner in Foster City May 31.

         For the third consecutive year, Off Camera garnered first-place honors in the Public Relations, Newsletter category. The publication has received first- and second-place honors from the organization since 2010. Recipients are Kevin Wing, Patty Zubov, Keith Sanders, Karen Owoc and Darryl Compton.

        Also receiving first-place honors in the Public Relations, Press Kit category are Julie Watts, Craig Franklin, Patty Zubov, Linda Giannecchini, Keith Sanders and Darryl Compton. 

        The Chapter earned a second-place award for Public Relations, Overall Excellence. Recipients are Keith Sanders, Patty Zubov, Kevin Wing, Sultan Mirza and Darryl Compton

Gold & Silver Circle Profiles   

      He was always dressed in black, from head to toe. Sometimes, he wore a black cowboy hat. He might have been short in stature, but he was a big man in the Bay Area television news industry. His presence was always known at any story or news conference he covered. He had a gruff, told-it-like-it-was personality that commanded attention. And he did, in more ways than one.

     That was Willie Kee, a cameraman for KTVU Channel 2 for nearly a quarter of a century. He was known for his clothes, his Fu Manchu goatee, and his in-your-face demeanor. But, he was also known for being a caring, sensitive man who was an outstanding photographer. He was as much admired as he was feared, but in a good way. He commanded respect. Reporters and photographers from other stations got out of his way when he arrived at news conferences. It was part of his shtick to say something mean to his competitors, but it was just shtick. He never meant any harm. He was a good guy. The guy had serious personality.

      And, Kee would take things into his own hands, even if it meant breaking the law now and then. In the late 1980s, when I was an intern at KTVU, I went out one night on a story with Kee and reporter Rita Williams. We were in San Francisco. I can't remember the story, but what I do remember is Kee driving the three of us to an evening news conference in an old Cadillac of a news car that looked like something out of television's The Streets of San Francisco, the 1970s Karl Malden/Michael Douglas crime drama. We were going to be late. Kee decided to take a shortcut and drive the wrong way down a one-way street. When cars approached us traveling in the correct direction, Kee merely drove onto the sidewalk to keep us from getting hit head-on. It was quite an adventure for a 24-year-old intern sitting in the back seat. Not to worry. No pedestrians were anywhere in sight when we were driving momentarily on the sidewalk. As far as I can remember, at least. Oh, we made it to the news conference on time, too. 

      Kee, who died in October 2001 at the age of 64 after a brief hospitalization, was inducted into the Silver Circle of the San Francisco/Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1995, a year after retiring from a career that earned him 12 Emmys for his work.

    Kee, who had lived in Fremont, had worked at KTVU from 1970 until his retirement in 1994. The award-winning photojournalist covered the biggest stories of his era, including the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the Oakland Hills firestorm in 1991, the UC Berkeley campus riots, the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, nine national political conventions, and interviews with seven U.S presidents.

    Those 12 Emmys weren't just for Kee's camerawork. He was multi-talented: two were for producing and one for writing. The remaining nine were for his keen, sharp eye for photography. He was proudest of his Emmy for a feature about the traveling Vietnam Veterans wall exhibition, which he taped, wrote and narrated. Kee was, himself, a proud Marine.

    Kee was a native of Oakland's Chinatown and a graduate of Oakland Technical High School, where he first discovered his love of photography, capturing campus life for the school newspaper and yearbook. After honing his skills as a Marine Corps photographer and writer, he returned to civilian life as a longtime still photographer for the Norton Pearl Photo Agency in San Mateo, which provided news photos for Peninsula newspapers. As a photographer in the 1960's for the old Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, Kee befriended many of the legends of show business, including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Carol Channing and San Jose's Smothers Brothers. Kee later served as a technical consultant on a Smothers Brothers film and as an extra in the cast of several feature films shot in the Bay Area.

   

Willie Kee In the 1970s, with KTVU colleagues. From left: photographers Craig Scheiner and Don McCuaig, and reporter Betty Ann Bruno.

Kee never forgot his Chinatown roots. As a pioneer Asian American in media, he advocated fair, sensitive, accurate news coverage of Asian Pacific Americans. At KTVU, he shot and produced an investigative series, which later was turned into a half-hour documentary, on the realities that Chinese Americans faced as low-wage laborers in garment sweatshops and restaurants. The documentary challenged society's inaccurate stereotypes of Chinatown as a gilded and secret society; it helped put human faces to the harsh realities Chinese Americans faced day to day.

    In 1988, Kee and Rosy Chu, who retired as KTVU's community affairs director in 2013, urged the station to broadcast live coverage of the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade. Kee co-hosted the first two years of the parade telecast with then-KTVU anchor Elaine Corral. The parade has been a fixture on KTVU ever since

    Kee was also a member of Bay Area Broadcast Legends. The Asian American Journalists Association recognized him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. The Oakland Public Schools honored him in 1984 with the Distinguished Alumnus Award for his work and commitment to students. He mentored dozens of aspiring photographers at Oakland High School's Visual Arts Academy Magnet Program. 

    And, throughout his career, Kee was an inspiration and role model to hundreds of fellow Asian American journalists.

    Willie Kee was one of a kind. 

Jim works at WGAL TV in Lancaster, which has always been the power house station in central Pennsylvania. He got into the business because he looked at me and thought, "if he can do it, I certainly can." And he's been doing it for over forty years now. We worked together for some of those years in Harrisburg. In fact, for a few weeks before I moved to Cincinnati in the late 70's, we co-anchored together at WHP-TV. Jim is a meat-and-potatoes kind of reporter. Nothing flashy. He just knows what's under every rock in his community and he's got a strong relationship with the WGAL audience. 

 

Okay, we've covered some heady topics here, like Three Mile Island. Time for something a little light. Like we like to ask everyone, what's your favorite ice cream flavor?

I like ice cream way too much. I'm still a night owl from all the years of doing the late newscasts. Sometimes, my wife buys a half gallon of it and tries to hide it in the freezer. If I find it, I can put away the whole thing while I watch sports summaries until long after everyone else has gone to bed. Chocolate, please.

 

       For many years before becoming chief meteorologist at KGO-TV ABC7 in San Francisco, Spencer Christian was America's favorite weatherman on ABC-TV's Good Morning America, sitting alongside the likes of David Hartman (the program's original host), Joan Lunden, Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, among many others. Beginning in 1986, Christian was the program's weather anchor until he became KGO-TV ABC7's chief meteorologist in 1999.

      On June 5 and 6, Christian was in New York, filling in for Good Morning America's Ginger Zee, as she prepared to tie the knot.

      Without a doubt, millions of GMA viewers remember Christian from his 13 years on the show. For two mornings this month, the country got to see the talent we see in Christian weeknights in the San Francisco Bay Area.

      Congratulations, Spencer!

Robert Handa Rejoins KNTV June 23

for the last 16 years, is making a move -- heading south about 40 miles along  

Rex Von Arnswaldt   and Cam Tran  KITV duo ties the knot