I’m on TV!!

About a year ago I was asked to appear as a guest on a kids television show about rocks and minerals called Finding Stuff Out. I was asked to come an talk about rocks, minerals, geology in general and how I got interested in geology. The show is for 8-10 year olds and it is truly fantastic! It has a really interesting format where kids actually ask questions and the host, Harrison, answers them with the help of experts (me), goes to places to find the answers or does experiments. In the end the show concludes with an answer to the question that started it all. In the case of my episode it was about diamonds.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in a significant amount of the show including the “gold” panning challenge and the final wrap up at the end of the show, which has a bit of a humorous slant to it!

This was my first experience filming anything let alone a full out TV show so I was not sure what to expect when I arrived at the studio in Montreal. The first thing I was given was a terrific lunch, so that was a nice way to start the afternoon off.

Next I was shown to the set, which is incredible. See the pics below. It is truly amazing what the set designers and prop people can accomplish and I was pretty impressed. I was then given a script that had a few talking points. The actual dialog and what I say in the video is me speaking in my own words and basically making it up on the spot. This was pretty difficult so we would usually do a couple of takes as I polished my delivery a bit. All in all the 10 minutes of video that you see below took about 5-6 hours to shoot. The challenge section was by far the longest as we had to keep re-doing sections of the panning.

There is also a lot of people watching as we would shoot each scene including sound people, script editors, prop people, cameramen…..and more. This was kind of a weird feeling since it felt like I was performing some sort of live show but I was supposed to be speaking directly to Harrison. I had to keep reminding myself not to worry about everyone else. Harrison, who looks younger than he actually is, was also fantastic. The guy is crazy talented and is a big part of making the show so interesting and popular. I had a great day shooting the episode and hopefully it won’t be my last experience with this sort of thing! Maybe I’ll do a video blog here or two when I finally finish my PhD!??