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TheBuzz Erika Engle |
Honors for local
broadcasters in regional
Emmy competitionFour Hawaii television operations won regional Emmy awards Saturday from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Northern California chapter.
KHNL and KITV won two each, while KGMB and National Mobile Television each won one.
The chapter awarded 59 Emmys in 50 categories to television and cable stations from Visalia to the Oregon border, Hawaii and Reno.
KHNL won in the Sports Segment category for "Out of Sight," a story that aired during a newscast last May.
KHNL News Director Seth Feldman and photojournalist Duncan Armstrong produced a story about Virgil Stinnett, who Feldman describes as a blind, but rabid, University of Hawaii sports fan.
Attending a UH baseball game, Stinnett described the experience from his perspective.
KHNL's other award was in the Informational Program category for "Hawaii's Greatest Storm -- The Hurricane," which aired in June.
Anchor Pamela Young estimates she's up to eight Emmy awards after picking up two Saturday night in San Francisco.
She won a writing award for "Mixed Plate -- Bounty of Burgundy," shot in France, "when it was still cool to go to France." The show will be rebroadcast at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Young and photographer Stuart Ishikawa were awarded for "Behind the Cinnabar Gate," in the Community Program category. It marked the centennial of Shingon Buddhism in Hawaii and was largely shot in the mountains above Osaka, Japan. It's a first for Ishikawa.
"I am so proud of (Stuart), he worked his butt off," Young said. The special will air again at 7 p.m. June 5.
KGMB's "Warrior Pride: The Road to Respect," was a Sports Program category winner. Sports Director Liz Chun was executive producer and John Allen III was director for the special that aired in December.
It recapped the 2002 UH Warrior Football season, with behind-the-scenes coverage of the coaches' and players' days, seniors' recollections of why they became Warriors and head coach June Jones' turnaround of the program. Chun heaped praise on Allen, who entered the show while she was on vacation.
"I consider myself a complete rookie, and for the chance to have my work recognized is such a high honor, and overwhelming," she said.
National Mobile Television General Manager Rodney Kobayakawa won a specialty award for technical achievement. He is the engineer in charge of OIA football coverage for Oceanic Time Warner Cable of Hawaii and writes software to enhance broadcasts. One program ties the Aloha Stadium time-keeping mechanisms into a character generator to show the game clock on the screen. Another program allows information from an Xcel spreadsheet to flow directly into the character generator, cutting data entry from hours to minutes. Yet another mimics high-cost equipment, giving broadcast engineers quick access to game footage for replay, for example.
"I'm trying to provide bells and whistles to Oceanic so they get more value for their dollar," he said. "With high school sports we can still do as good a job or better than college, at the NCAA level" on a shoestring budget, he said.
The Hawaii wins came in competition with major market powerhouse TV stations in San Francisco where as many as five people worked on a single entry. The Hawaii contenders were also up against large cable operations such as Fox Sports Net.
"It means even more when you go up against big-market stations," Feldman said.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com