Creating New Ways to Keep Busy

The University had just opened up a whole new building my freshman year, the Education Technology Center, which included a fully functioning TV Studio.  At the beginning of my sophomore year, they relocated the campus TV channel gear to the same building.  To that point, the campus channel had only ever been used to playback tapes and DVDs of previously recorded content.  But I convinced the TV production teacher to let us patch in the output from the TV Studio, giving us the capability of producing a Live TV show, broadcast into the dorms on cable.

So with the help of a few others in my TV Production class, I set about creating a TV show to produce.  I didn’t really care what the show was about, and since I didn’t watch TV myself, I had no idea the degree to which “CLU Late Night with Brian Wynn,” was ripping off “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.”  But it didn’t really matter, we had a TV show.  It was not associated with any class or organization, and not supervised by any staff member, so we could do what ever we dared.  We shot and aired it on Thursday nights at 11pm, and we never did get around to advertising it beyond our immediate friends, but later discovered that word had gotten around, and nearly half of the school was watching.

Brian and his sidekick Jack wrote and performed the content, while I had recruited the two guys from my 3-Screen project the year before to run the technology side of the picture and sound mixing.  We had communications students run the cameras, and multimedia students doing design for the on-screen graphics, which I created an innovative system for ingesting to the switcher in real-time.  It became quite the operation to run, and everyone involved was just volunteering their time, to be involved in something cool.  Our planning meetings were frequently scheduled at 1am or 2am, and we basically did whatever we wanted with it.  The content was very much college humor, and full of inside jokes that limited the potential audience to our students.  We never did anything that was inappropriate enough to get us kicked off the air, but Brian definitely pushed it as far as he could.  We managed to create four episodes by Christmas break, and things were going well.

I also began to get involved in another venture, that wouldn’t fully come to fruition until the following spring.  A number of the guys from Animus the previous year had set about starting a new sports team at the school, to play lacrosse.  I had never even seen lacrosse, let alone played it, but I had previously said I would play any other club sport besides Rugby, and I am a man of my word, so I agreed to join the effort.  It was another totally student led initiative, and we didn’t have a coach or administrator.  We started acquiring gear and practicing at a field across the street that fall to prepare for the season.

As part of my leadership role in the Lord of Life congregation, I had taken on the job of leading a small group bible study that year as well.  Technically I co-led it with a classmate, Micah.  We had about six people who regularly attended every week.  Micah was the child of two distinguished pastors, so he was familiar with the shepherding aspect of leading, and I guess you could say I focused on teaching, although those roles weren’t deliberately defined at the time.  It is amusing to look back on the fact that we used to meet at 11pm, and that wasn't considered strange.  We were the only small group of the seven or eight that were started that year, to actually persist past the semester break, let alone the entire school year, a fact that I was pretty proud of.