1180. A Day in the Life: What's It Really Like to Be a Live Event Technical Producer?

“ Growing up I was super into sports, baseball being my favorite. Like any kid or friend my age, I wanted to play professional sports as my job.

I knew I was headed for sports. I just didn’t know where or how.

“ In 11th grade, I needed one class to fill out my course selection. There was an elective that was a TV production class. The description was: a trip to New York City to tour NBC studios and 30 Rockefeller Center, and watching a TV show being taped. I thought ‘how bad could it be!’

“I ended up loving the class. I loved my teacher, Mrs. Jason, and her husband was a field producer for Good Morning America who spoke to the class on a lot of occasions.

“I already had a love of sports, and now I had this new passion for TV.  I also knew I needed a backup to my professional baseball plan. BOOM! Now I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I was going to get into sports TV.”

Howie Zales is an Emmy Awarded camera operator who started his career at the NFL Network and NBC Sports. His passion for broadcasting led him to found Viridity Entertainment Services (VES), a streaming and professionally-recorded in-house productions service offering TV-quality livestream to corporations. Their clients include T Mobile, Capital One, The Food Network, hip hop group Salt-N-Pepa, and more. His other company, which he founded and has operated for over 24 years, is HJC Productions, Inc., a nationwide television crewing company for sports, entertainment and studio productions.

Howie also mentors the next generation of freelance technicians through his mentoring program The Broadcast Sports Course.