Anchorboy

As I mentioned last week, I was on the local news yesterday to talk about Kickstarter and my game. I’ll cut right to the chase, because you probably want to see the video. A video that I watched once and will probably never watch again–it’s really tough for me to watch myself do something like this. Here it is.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s back up.

After I signed in at the security desk, I was ushered onto the main floor of KSDK, St. Louis’ NBC affiliate. I took a seat at a table, and I immediately took this photo and put it on Facebook (social media win! Although I forgot to check in on Foursquare. Huge missed opportunity. HUGE.)

It’s one, big open floor. I guess it’s not all that dissimilar from HBO’s The Newsroom, but with lower ceilings. Overall it was very nice, though.

After a few minutes, the reporter, Kay Quinn, came over to speak with me. She had an iPad with the script, and we went over the questions (which she had also sent me in advance). She told me that I would be on camera at times, and other times they would show screenshots from Kickstarter. In fact, I had received some good advice from several different people before that day. This was the advice I was juggling at the time:

• Look at the anchor, not the camera.
• Don’t clasp my hands.
• Smile.
• Mention my company name.
• Have a few soundbites prepared.
• Don’t talk too fast.
• Don’t overpromote my game.

After we chatted, Kay had a similar chat with two other guests, one of whom I knew very loosely through church. So we talked for a few minutes before they went on, and then Kay called me over to get my mic and take a seat. We strategically small-talked for a few minutes, and then we were on.

I don’t know if you can tell by the video, but I was very nervous. I was mostly thrown off by the beginning when Kay was talking to the camera. I had been told to look at her, not the camera, but it seemed like a long time to look at her when she wasn’t looking at me, so I looked at the camera, and then I debated smiling or not smiling (I did both at the same time), and then finally after approximately an eternity, Kay addressed me. At that point, time compressed itself, and approximately 1 millisecond passed before the entire interview was done. Kay thanked me, mentioned that I should come back when the game is released in May, and took off.

Everything went so quickly. I really wish I had more time to talk about Kickstarter in general, but Kay seemed to steer me in the direction of my game, so I went with it. I called a few corworkers who I know were watching as I walked out, and they pointed out that I didn’t tell people how to find the game. I had thought that would be shown on the screen somewhere, but apparently not. So I was disappointed that I might have missed a big opportunity there.

Also, in the video it sometimes looks like I’m missing three teeth. Is that just me? I’m not missing three teeth.

However, despite my nervousness, despite my mistakes, despite my missed opportunity, despite my “missing” teeth, nothing beats the fact that one of the photos they chose to represent the game during the interview (I think they grabbed them from Facebook) is none other than my Biddy boy scratching his face on the Viticulture board. That made my day when I watched the interview for the first time last night (it aired live and went online later).

What do you think?