| Subject: Public Access TV Channel in Grant County |
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Date Posted: Fri, February 20 2004, 10:53:18 PST
New club searching for budding Spielbergs: Video Makers Club wants to start public-access channel in Moses Lake
By Erik Olson, Herald Staf Writer
http://www.columbiabasinherald.com/index.asp?Sec=news&str=1369&arch=y
Don't know what to do with those videotapes of your children playing in the park or riding the ferris wheel for the first time at SpringFest? Michael McGinn wants that footage. In fact, he also wants you to join his Video Makers Club to put life in Moses Lake on film and eventually start a public-access television station.
The Video Makers Club started meeting in January on every third Saturday of the month at the Moses Lake Moose Lodge at 7 p.m. McGinn said the biggest turnout a meeting has seen is 11 people, but he knows it's early. McGinn has not even reached the point of registering the club as a nonprofit organization to qualify for grants, but he plans to. "When I started researching public access television, I realized there is a great need for it, and we don't have it," he said.
Northland Cable will show community events filmed by Moses Lake High School's video production class at times, as the Grant County PUD on its Zipp network. The Federal Communications Commission does not require that local cable companies offer Public, Educational and Governmental Access channels, but the federal agency does allow the franchising authority? which is the city of Moses Lake ? the right to exercise that option.
That move is still a ways in the future. But McGinn has a vision of a channel that would offer a variety of local programming. He would like to see meetings and community events televised (the high school production team already films Moses Lake City Council meetings), documentaries and even short feature films. "It would also provide a platform for artistic expression in a video-media format," he said. McGinn said he hopes to model the channel after the Yakima Community Access Channel, which is one of the oldest of its kind in the country.
McGinn himself has little training in video production, having recently bought a portable camera only a few years ago. He said he was first introduced to the idea of public-access television watching movies such as "Wayne's World," the Saturday Night Live spin-off where two wanna-be rocksters produce their own cable-access show and are eventually offered a lucrative television contract. But once he began seriously researching the idea, McGinn said he started to see it as something that would benefit the community. McGinn, who is a member of Vision 2020, the group dedicated to the betterment and appeal of Moses Lake, has already shot some footage himself, and he thinks the Video Makers Club could help Vision 2020 by documenting the changes the committee initiates in town. He took his Canon ZR10 digital camcorder ? which weighs less than five pounds ? to the May SpringFest and captured about 10 hours of footage, and he also shot promotional footage for the Duel in the Desert golf tournament.
The club so far has no resources nor cameras to lend out, so interested videographers now must have their own cameras. McGinn hopes to build the club to include a film festival, modeled after the famous independent Sundance Film Festival, or maybe a competition of funny videos. "It would give folks who don't have a voice, a voice,": he said.
For make information about the Video Makers Club, contact McGinn at 764-2420 or go to his Web site at:
http://videomakers.mtbn.net
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