Guerrilla Gardening

“…a Tigger who bounced, if he bounced at all, in just the beautiful way a Tigger ought to bounce.” – A.A. Milne

Here it comes! Number 3! On September 18 at 7:30 pm and September 20 at 10:30 am on Wisconsin Public Television – another bit of television fame! Whahoooooooo!

Here’s the Shelley Ryan Challenge: Pare It Down! From the list of fun garden ideas, select three that can be realistically accomplished indoors on a January day! That’s right – three gardening concepts that can be “realistically accomplished” in January in Wisconsin! No relocating to Key West! Ya’ gotta’ make it happen here in Baileys! Got it? Good.

Next, select props that will be big, bold and legible on the screen. Cluster them close at hand so as you babble the single camera never loses sight of you. Bright smiling faces only, please! Backs turned are rude!

Now, hit your six-minute target three times! No more. No less. These are six-minute takes straight through. Editing is minimal in order to maintain the feeling of conversation. Making the crew happy is the goal and the crew is happy with three takes as close to identical as possible. Redundancy means that the first take when the prop fell over with a loud bang can be thrown out and the second take when you start laughing at Shelley’s perpetual jokes can be trashed and the third take with its practiced ease remains to be used on-air! Whew!

One day of set-up. One and half days of taping (movies “shoot,” but television “tapes”). And, a half day of clean-up yields eighteen minutes of usable footage. It’s a really surprising amount of work! You be the judge of whether or not the effort was worth it!

Segment number three is described by Shelley as “preserving the harvest in an unusual manner…”

Check out the Wisconsin Gardener page on http://www.wpt.org and then watch us BOUNCE!