My portfolio of work with this hobby of mine…

BCOP-TV Copenhagen 2014-2019, 2021-2023

I decided to do newsgathering with Minifigures as far back as 2014. I did creative work too. I was not full time but barely per diem when the station needed me.

BCOP-TV was going through major change in it’s identity, after a year of clunky, and uncharacteristic branding. In late 2014, BCOP-TV started using it’s calls and branded BCOP 6 – Standing for Copenhagen, based loosely after KHOU in Houston, as it’s Belo Corp days were gone. The idea was to revere-engineer it’s super-sexy graphics and the Belo spirit to Copenhagen.

What I did was hobbled packages when I could. I spent less than 10 hours a week acting as a freelancer – there was a lot of “work” to simulate live off air in an environment I had no equipment to do so.

Up until the end of February Sweeps of 2023;  I was the Associate Producer to Special Projects & Creative Services where I produce news stories of higher depth of issues and promote the crap via the CSD. This includes local debates, Thanksgiving Parades, Christmas events and a special serial reports on masculinity entitled: Tuned Out: Are [Minibrick’s] Capital Region Men OK? 

The specific responsibilities were between a mixed bag of what happens in real life, plus a bit more because I am a one person environment

• Shooting video on a solid state camera at full HD
• Lego minifigures were shot in live environments. (I’LL MAKE THIS VERY CLEAR, WE DID NOT DO STOP-MOTION AT ALL) This included but not limited to, “live-to-tape” recordings of  moving minifigures on bricks that would either be cropped or not be seen on frame. Anchors would “wiggle” around their desk chairs
• While not having a full blown production switching and audio mixing (and in fact it’s not worth it either because you’ll need to edit it anyways), editing (from 2015-2019) was done on the legacy Apple Final Cut Pro (version 7 to be exact) then later on using Avid’s Media Composer | First (that actually came out in 2017… a bit fashionably late?)
• Sometimes in the early years I was so adlib, that I didn’t entirely write all the copy all the time. But as time went on, I was able to take time to write stories and then build a really primitive NRCS; by 2018, I wasn’t adlibbing and stuff, mixed in with my social anxiety
• Chroma Keys (aka the so-callled “Green Screen”) was done on cardstock green paper. In order do to that, I to shoot that separately because the depth of field (or DOF) is over dramatized in the Minifig scaling.
• Since I don’t consider my digital art to be disposable,  the challenge was to keep archives all content, and storing media on 250 GB PATA drives was becoming more and more of a challenge, and BluRay discs and drives were still cost-prohibitive
• I needed an external hard drive to keep the edit media and files together, something that took me years to figure out.
• All the streams on YouTube was done using OBS, which has improved significantly.

BCOP Newsradio (2017 – Present)

I am sometimes heard by ABS figurines, and have done a number of fill-in roles from that time to present. This was around the time I would attend my first NAB Show and had a natural interest in producing and being a talent. The workflow was cheap and often unreliable. I used a webcam, an older version of OBS and a Radio Shack/”Realistic” brand mixer and a cheap mic.

My first broadcast was in March of 2017, after building a newsroom computer system, that wasn’t even close to iNews quality, and an audio workflow that was bad. The first day technical problems flew left and right… and in fact a man named Sean Spicer helped save my shift, when he had a White House Presser around noon Eastern Time. For those 20 minutes; I was able to regather the rundown.

Since then significant improvements to the system I built in my media room at home has made all productions much smoother than when I started from scratch in 2014.

The work on the radio side was very primitive even for a real-life small market.

• The “board” as they say in radio, as the mixer, was a Realistic/Radio Shack mixer from the 1980s, I found at a Amherst flea market in 2013. I never was able to find the appropriate power supply, so it took 4 AA batteries, so that was it’s power source.
• The Mac Mini acted as both an audio playout and the master audio out, this resulted in unable to surf the web because some random video could play on the same source as I played off an audio clip
• Later in 2017, all the sound effects came off an iOS app called SoundByte, the icon that looks like a phonograph, this was an improvement because it was a separate audio source.
• Generic recordings like ads and stuff, were recorded from an iPhone or from the Mac itself
• Beginning in 2021, a massive improvement occurred. In early 2020, the Berringer Xenyx 1000 mixer was for sale, but for whatever reason it was no longer produced, perhaps the pandemic? I would be able to buy one from a Mercari seller in March 2021. At least for that time, the advantage was to have full control of all the audio. There was downsides to that too. One of the biggest advantages was to mix audio to play out on a PA type of system, known as return audio. For instance if you wanted to take a break with your headphones, and wanted to hear the network in the studio, this is how that works, known officially as Aux Send. You typically wouldn’t want your mic to be open on this channel, unless you wanted some feedback!

Digital One News (DNO) – 2020

After disagreements with BCOP Management – I was fired for a tweet, I went to help build a Lego studio and a news operation, built for and solely for streaming. Digital One News, was based on the primary DSL Internet service by Old World Communications, a half-baked Bell Operating company in the minifig world. Like Verizon’s Fios News 1, DNO was basically streaming only.  DNO was also introduced in the metro region of Miniland, 100 miles south. Also, DNO was rolled to other Minfiig parts of the world.

DNO Launched on September 1st, 2020 in the midst of COVID 19.

Presently I am a producer for The Bob Hopeless Show, a Saturday talk and call in show on the network.

BCOP Newsradio – 2021/22

The radio side allowed me to do an overnight shift on the Daylight Saving Morning of March; and tentatively use my journalistic curiosity to do a tech show called Tech Beat on Saturday afternoons with no more interest in technology either in IT or high tech per se, the program was a call in. Later on in fall of 2021,  BRCK Miniland took the show. By early winter, the show got shifted to nights because of hockey games pre empting the show. I found out Tech Beat was canceled by reading the Copenhagen Courier. January 8th, 2022 was the last show.

I took a position to be a evening anchor that would make me do 10 hours a week doing weeknight news. My start date was supposed to start on the night of the leak of Roe v Wade, which would’ve been a disaster because I struggle with breaking news especially wall to wall in radio.

• Tech Beat required at least a couple hours of same day producing, if you’re lucky at least do some before the weekend. You gather the audio, the sketch callers, some of the news stories by the anchor.
• Audio was edited in Audacity, and sometimes used as playout SoundByte was used to trigger sounders  and the stream came from the Windows ThinkPad that did a better job at streaming over the Mac. All episodes of Tech Beat was recorded
• Tech Beat was open to finding social media influencers such as Kate Fox (aka the Macintosh Librarian but was really snooty at the no responses when requested a couple times spread out in months)

As of August 31st,  2023, BCOP Newsradio was off the air

B21MK-TV Copenhagen/Merrimack – late 2022

Capital Region Media, the owners of BCOP-TV decided to grow it’s business into the real world, having fictional figurines cover real-world events. The license is in the Minifig world, but the studios is in the community of where your humble minifig newsie lives. The station’s news operations is scheduled for a “fall launch” upon approval of the Minifig Communications Commission, this similar to a license being in a foreign country; and the studios in another, think of XETV in San Diego, and CKLW in Detroit (license is in the other country, and the studios are domestic.)

The call sign is again fictitious and intended for a clear boundary the difference. It will be a part time news operation, airing news on weekends, while the rest of the week it will air straight up BCOP-TV feeds except for primetime.

The only intention is to stream and publish original sourced New Hampshire News; without rip and read, and to make WMUR-TV jealous and the NBCU cluster, with licenses in said town (Telemundo) and Nashua for the NBC O&O.

The First Amendment is not regarded by state authorities and it’s very covert about their anti First Amendment views. Allow the fictional media to let the real-life state know they are part of the United States, and we will show it to them with a harda-s approach to local media, something WMUR-TV pretends, and WBIN couldn’t do because of the corporate wh0re of Bill Binnie.

We’re comin…