BCM reporter Brooke Cummings interviewed Oliver Stone on the BIFF red carpet

When I came out of the non-profit world as a fund raiser and event planner, those skills melded quite well in my new life as a movie maker. When I used to run the local public access TV station, Boulder Community Media (BCM), one of the community outreach activities was to provide video production coverage for the Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) starting in 2006.

BCM is currently recruiting news team member for the upcoming BIFF March 5 to 8 in Downtown Boulder.

BIFF and BCM shared space in a Pearl Street Mall building. We both moved around the corner to a place on 13th and Walnut. During those early years of BIFF, it was Tony Perri and myself doing to video news and then it was myself in 2007.

BCM producer Alan O’Hashi and Blythe Danner at a recent BIFF

BCM has a part of its nonprofit charter to provide community outreach and educational opportunities for students of all ages. In 2008, BCM expanded it’s coverage by partnering with the University of Colorado broadcast journalism school and that at Fairview High School. BCM now runs six or seven, five person crews each day throughout the BIFF. Quite the growth, considering coverage started out with two people.

The BIFF news production team gives real world experience to students about real world news beats and getting news packages pushed out as soon as possible. The BIFF attracts well known celebrities including Shirley MacClain, James Franco, William H. Macy, Martin Sheen and others and the BIFF news coverage is often the only coverage that gets picked up by the various news services.

BIFF host Ron Bostwick talks with James Franco.

Be a part of the action – If you’d like to be a part of the BIFF that is largely unseen and very interesting, behind the scenes experience inquire within! For the most part, you do need to have particular expertise and experience with news, but we can always use more Production Assistants willing to learn by observation and diving into a project.

Download the BCM volunteer agreement and email it back to BCM.

The schedule won’t be released until later in February, but we’re getting the word out so you can make plans around classes, work, and other commitments.

BCM uses a “transmedia” approach where we produce news in a variety of forms:

• Editors – copy editors and video editors
• Writers – news gathers to go along to events
• Still Photographers – for all activities
• Video Photographers – for all activities
• Producers – if you want to produce, you should also have at least one other skill, have at a minimum a still camera and a strong back to schlepp gear.
• Social media – update facebook pages, tweet pix and experiences
• Website updates and maintenance

BCM reporter Bonnie Hoffman on the BIFF red carpet in front of the Boulder Theater.

BCM generally runs at least two crews at any given moment, which means each crew has a producer, a video camera operator, a still camera operator a reporter on camera and a reporter off camera. In most cases, our news crews will be the only ones covering these events, many are newsworthy and your stories, images and video will be pushed out to the wire.

Equipment – BCM will provide video cameras and tape for field work. BCM will have a MacBook Pro with Final Cut 7 available. We are inventorying assets and also let me know what kind of equipment you may be able to provide:

* video cameras etc. (they can be solid state and consumer grade, tripods, lights)
* still cameras (pocket cameras to DSLR cameras – do they have video capabilities)
* lap top computers (pc or mac and editing systems – Premiere, iMovie, FCP, movie maker)

Send an email to BCM if you’d like to be a part of the action. You can also join the BIFF News Team Production Call facebook page to keep up with the latest.