re: What's the most pressure filled situation that you have ever been in?

Directing a live 10 o’clock newscast, we had just started a new system of rolling our own videos with an extra computer next to the director’s board. That was stressful enough because previously all I had to do was say “roll A” or “roll B” and another guy would start the video and I would take it.

Right before we went live the graphics computer went down, the person running that was responsible for all the titles and graphics for the whole newscast. On the fly I had to take the entire graphics package and put it on my computer so I could run it all myself.

So I was not only calling and punching the show which some stations use two people for, I was also running all the videos and graphics. Basically I had to do the jobs of four people at once and it was 60 seconds before we went live.

The control room was completely silent because everyone was aware of how much I needed to focus to pull all that off. In the middle of the A block the engineer got the graphics computer running again but I kept going because I was in such a groove.

Pulled off the A block seamlessly and no joke, everybody in the control room clapped when we finally went to commercial. Most focused I’ve ever been and you wouldn’t have noticed at home how stressful it was. Felt very accomplished in that moment.