Teaching Design in Television Production Technology: The Twelve Steps of Preproduction.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With the relatively recent increase in engineering education initiatives, the use of industrial design as a core attribute of technology education has become an influential position in the field. In this process, a fundamental core of technology education may have fallen to the wayside. That core content area, communication technology, is in danger of being categorized as the use of computer-aided design and drafting (CAD) to support industrial designs. Warner (2003) saw the value of a broader view of teaching design when he stated that [design]: needs to involve much more than instruction on the manipulative skills of tools or making drawings, more than instruction on the intellectual knowledge of how a task can be done. In short, teaching design within the context of technology education must involve teaching students how to actively use both their minds and their hands in order to be creative, inventive problem solvers. (p. 7) Fortunately, there are subject areas within communication technology that include design strategies not exclusively based on CAD. Television production technology, not necessarily thought of as a design-based curriculum, actually lends itself to the design process quite readily. Preproduction stages for television and multimedia production are distinct and transferable from the world of commercial and dramatic films to technology education classrooms. One particular design process is the twelve steps of preproduction, which includes specific procedures for designing quality video productions. Extensive planning must be used to produce television programs. Students must develop sound design practices and understand these attributes of design in their production planning (ITEA, 2000/2002/2007). Through the design and planning processes involved in television production, students learn that design is a creative process, and that there is no perfect design, but rather that design is a compromise of several attributes. Throughout the preproduction process, students begin to understand that the planning of their television production needs to be continually checked and critiqued, with proactive refinements to their original plan. An example of refinement would be time constraints to a production. College students on their campus CCTV network plan to produce a quick-meals cooking show for other college students. Unfortunately, during the actual video production, the meal takes too long to prepare. In order for the meal to be completed during the show, students in postproduction decide to delete the part of the video that lists the ingredients for the meal. Viewers are directed to a website where they can print the ingredients instead of taking precious show time to list and explain the ingredients. This scenario is an appropriate example of how design can be compromised and in this case, the change works for the best. This article is designed to introduce the twelve steps of preproduction that film, television, and advertising producers use. The twelve steps of production is an authentic design tool in television production technology that does not hinder student creativity, but rather logically sequences their ideas into a purposeful and working form. Formative rubrics may be used to assess each of the twelve steps. All twelve steps can be linked to specific benchmarks in Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology (ITEA, 2000/2002/2007). Figure 1 highlights those benchmark connections. Twelve Steps of Preproduction After being assigned a topic, students often brainstorm for a few minutes to decide how they will solve the stated problem in order to begin videotaping as soon as possible. For the vast majority of students who take this route in their planning, a great amount of time is wasted during both the production and postproduction processes. …