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On the Road

Feb 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Cody Holt

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Co-founder of the nation’s most honored nonprofit media center, Jon Alpert has dreamed up a way to take his good will on tour.

On its maiden voyage last fall, the Cybercar visited 26 cities in New York over a 25-day period.

Jon Alpert has always loved cars and trucks. Especially big trucks. And buses. Sitting in his office at Downtown Community Television Center in New York City, he can sometimes hear the roar of the city buses on the busy Chinatown streets below.

“Every time I hear a bus go by I know what type it is and I wish I had it,” says Alpert, who co-founded DCTV 31 years ago with his wife, Keiko Tsuno. “I have a fascination with vehicles. I'm an American, of course I do.”

But Alpert's fascination with vehicles would seem to go deeper than national pride; even deeper than the sensory appeal of roaring engines and burning rubber. For Alpert, cars, trucks, and buses are vehicles of change. Just look at his vehicular history at DCTV, an independent, nonprofit media center where the grass-roots mission is to teach people, particularly members of low-income and minority communities, to produce insightful and artistic television.

In 1972, when DCTV was in its infancy and Alpert and Tsuno were teaching free video production workshops from their loft in Chinatown, Alpert purchased a used mail truck for $5 at a government auction. Nearly every day that summer, the couple loaded the back of the mail truck with their video equipment, which included a 1/2in. Sony AV-3400 Portapak reel-to-reel camera and two black-and-white Setchel-Carelson monitors, and parked it on their neighborhood's busiest roadway, Canal Street.

“We did programs about conditions in the local hospitals and schools. ‘PS 23 Needs a Chinese Principal’ was a popular one. We also showed English lessons for the immigrant Chinese,” Alpert recalls. “We had a terrible problem with ambient sunlight in those days. We couldn't park the truck on a sunny street corner because you couldn't see the monitors. We would build out these huge plywood extensions like awnings, but the damn things went out 20 or 30 feet.”

Alpert says the monitors worked much better at night, but the B&W Sony camera that Tsuno's mother had sent from Japan wouldn't pick up anything after dark. “If you wanted to do a live show, you really couldn't because the monitors didn't work well during the day and the camera wouldn't pick up anything at night. So you had to choose between the camera and the monitors,” Alpert says.

Despite the technical limitations, the mail truck still drew a crowd — usually 10 to 20, but sometimes as many as 75 people would gather at the back of the converted delivery truck where the two monitors were stacked. It was so effective that in the fall of 1973 the New York Board of Education hired Alpert and Tsuno to drive their video caravan through the streets of Brooklyn to stir up interest in a school board election. By this time, Alpert had upgraded to a used plumbing truck, but the results were the same.

“We increased voter turnout by about 35%,” Alpert recalls. “It was pretty effective. There was a lot of interaction with the crowd and people really got into it. It was also the type of stuff that got us excited about making television.”

At each stop, public officials (here, Carl McCall being interviewed in front of the Cybercar) showed up to address the state’s youth. Footage from the tour was used to create a one-hour PBS documentary called Speak Up New York!

Fast-forward 30 years, and DCTV — now 30 employees strong with Alpert and Tsuno still at the helm — is making and teaching video with the same passion that created the organization in the early '70s. But today, the trucks are much bigger. And so are the crowds.

For the last four years, Alpert has dreamed of buying a 40ft. bus and transforming it into a mobile production vehicle similar to the vans of his early days in video. The plan was to hit the road and get Americans to think about and discuss important societal issues on camera, using the bus to create a buzz as it went from city to city.

“I thought if we could not only narrowcast but also broadcast what we were doing it would really harness the technology and continue what we started doing in the streets 30 years ago,” Alpert says. “I guess it proves that I haven't had a new idea in 30 years.”

After running into a series of roadblocks, Alpert's mobile broadcast studio finally got a jump start in 1998 when the National Endowment for the Arts awarded DCTV one of its prestigious Leadership Projects for the Millennium Challenge Grants. The only catch was that to qualify for the $250,000 cash award, DCTV had to raise more than three times that amount. After three decades of living on a nonprofit budget, Alpert knew it wouldn't be an easy task.

“We should have given up on the dream hundreds of times over the last four years,” he says, “but I'm glad we didn't.”

After receiving several extensions from the NEA to raise the matching funds, Alpert's persistence paid off when several manufacturers agreed to contribute equipment to the “Millennium Mobile,” as it was known at the time. Among the most significant contributors were Panasonic, Avid, Miranda, Global Streams, Sacco, and British Telecom, all of which either donated equipment or sold it to DCTV at a deep discount.

Panasonic stepped up with two plasma screens — a TH50PHD5UY 50in. model and a TH42PWD5UY 42in. unit — as well as five AG-DVX100 24p/30p/60i MiniDV camcorders, three AW-E600 convertible cameras, and two AJ-D455 DVCPRO VTRs. Panasonic also facilitated the purchase of three AW-PH350 pan/tilt heads and an AWRP-605 for remote operation of the AW-E600 cameras.

For its part, Avid contributed six Avid Xpress DV laptop editors and a Unity network-attached storage system for housing and serving all digital media to the workstations in realtime. Global Streams donated two GlobeCaster Studio boxes, and Miranda chipped in with a Kaleido multi-image display processor, which has since been upgraded to the company's K2 model. Sacco came to the table with a 4'×6' LED Times Square-style videoscreen, and British Telecom provided an automated KU-band satellite system.

With money he had raised through other donors and the considerable equipment contributions in hand, Alpert received the NEA grant and the search began for a suitable bus. For this, Alpert hired Chase Pierson, a technology consultant and owner of Idle Hands Productions of Woodstock, N.Y., in March 2001. Pierson had recently helped relocate the studios of Democracy Now!, a public-radio and television show, into DCTV's Chinatown studios. He had also been contracted by Free Speech Television, a Dish Network public-interest programmer and the TV broadcast outlet of Democracy Now!, to find a satellite truck for the now 8-year-old network. Realizing the synergy of the two situations, Pierson put Alpert in contact with John Schwartz, president of Free Speech TV, and the two agreed to become financial partners in the Millennium Mobile. But there was still no bus.

During the Speak Up New York! tour, youth volunteers conducted interviews with politicians like Rep. Charles Rangel.

After a four-month search, Pierson finally found the right bus at the right price in Nashville, Tenn., where a missionary group was selling a 40ft. custom sleeper below market value because of its unusual floorplan. “The configuration wasn't a problem for us because we were going to gut [the interior],” Pierson says. “The bus had a brand new motor and it was by far the best deal we could find. Most buses we were looking at were $400,000 to $500,000, but that was more than our budget for the entire project. We paid $70,000.”

By this time — after the struggle to get matching funds for the NEA grant, the lengthy search for the bus, and a significant delay because of the events of Sept. 11, 2001 — Alpert's dream was nearly 4 years old. It was May 2002, and he finally had his bus and plenty of equipment. It was time to build the “Cybercar,” as it was then known.

In June 2002, production on the Cybercar picked up speed. Plans were underway to hit the road at the end of September and none of the video equipment had been installed. Before that could happen, Alpert drove the bus upstate to Nyack, where one of his hockey buddies, John Schuyler, worked for Hans Knutzen Associates, an architectural firm specializing in media and broadcast facilities. As the architect of Turner Studios' network operations center in Atlanta, Schuyler was accustomed to working in large spaces.

“The space constraints [of the bus] were enormous. It was more akin to designing the interior of a sailing yacht than a broadcast truck,” says Schuyler, who remembers getting that first phone call about the project from Alpert, who was sitting on the bus outside the architectural firm at the time. “It was exciting; a great challenge. I like designing things in compact spaces, and I also believe in what Jon is doing with DCTV so it was an honor to work with him.”

Schuyler agreed to work on the project for a nominal fee to cover his expenses and immediately began developing an interior design for the bus after his regular business hours at the firm. Within a couple of weeks, Schuyler had a plan to completely renovate the bus's 300-square-foot interior compartment, which is 38 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 6 feet, 10 inches from floor to ceiling at its highest point.

During the Chase Pierson and Noel Rabinowitz ran the production from inside the Cybercar's 95-square-foot master control room.

In the front of the bus, Schulyer designed a 90-square-foot presentation lounge where the 42in. plasma screen would be mounted. The area is large enough that up to five editors could work comfortably on laptop systems on several couches and chairs, all of which convert to beds and sleep up to seven people. The presentation lounge can also accommodate a three-camera shoot, with robotic cameras mounted on the bus's walls. The final purpose of the presentation lounge was to give equipment manufacturers a showroom to showcase their products — an important perk for the companies that generously contributed equipment.

In the center of the bus, there's a bunk-bed compartment and a small kitchenette with a microwave, refrigerator, and sink. There's also a restroom.

The control room is in the rear of the bus. Here, Schuyler had only 95 square feet to consider the current and future uses of the Cybercar. “That was the biggest challenge — getting a layout for the control room that would meet their current needs while being flexible enough for their future needs,” Schuyler says. “They may want to do different kinds of programming in the future.”

One of the most difficult aspects was finding room for rack bays. In the end, Schuyler tucked them away anywhere he could find, including under the main console desk.

With a design plan in place, the bus was then gutted and framed out. Next, the bus made a trip to New Jersey, where the final construction and finish work was done by Risco, a company that specializes in RV conversions. Risco also removed a portion of a wall on the rear passenger side of the bus and mounted the 4'x 6' LED videoscreen with its innards covered by a sheet of Plexiglas in the control room.

While the bus was in New Jersey, Pierson and his tech guy, Noel Rabinowitz, worked on a technical mock of the control room, which still sat empty in late September. Because time was getting short, the pair prebuilt all of the cables and punched down about 80% of the controls room's 900 connection points in DCTV's studios. When the bus was finally ready to accept equipment — about eight hours before the first scheduled road trip — Pierson and Rabinowitz carried all of the connections down to the bus in boxes and began plugging things in and working on the final equipment install.

“About 3 a.m. before the morning of the first event we started putting in the gear. There were four or five of us going crazy plugging things in and turning things on. It was a mad house,” Pierson recalls. “We installed the audio board on the way to the event and plugged everything in. Somehow it all worked — except for a short in the [external] videoscreen.”

During the The Cybercar’s presentation lounge, equipped with a 42in. Panasonic plasma screen, can accommodate a three-camera shoot or up to five video editors working on laptop computers. The furniture converts to beds and can sleep up to seven people during multiday tours.

After a quick fix, the Cybercar was fully operational for its first event, a live-to-tape shoot on Sept. 26, 2002, at the New York Urban League in Harlem.

After a successful debut in Harlem, the Cybercar visited 26 cities in 25 days to create a one-hour show entitled Speak Up New York! for PBS. In each city, the Cybercar entered town with its video wall lit up for a series of youth civic engagement seminars, which led up to a live televised youth Q&A with the state's gubernatorial candidates on Oct. 30, one week before Election Day. Eleven PBS stations broadcast the dialogue, which had been recorded at the Cybercar. In keeping with the program's youth theme, no one older than 27 years of age worked on the bus during the tour. The majority of them were volunteers.

Alpert says Speak Up New York! was an ideal first project for the Cybercar. “This was a project that we thought we could use technology to reinvigorate democracy, and that's what the Cybercar is intended for,” says Alpert, adding that hundreds of young people were registered to vote at the rallies and more than 85 public officials turned out to speak with the state's youth. “When you create public debate and get people to talk about things, things tend to get better. And people get energized. That's what was happening at the events. We even had Cybercar groupies.”

After the Speak Up rallies concluded, the Cybercar returned to the shop for some fine-tuning by Pierson and Rabinowitz, who ran the control room during the tour. “It was a great control room; very easy to work with,” says Pierson, who has since returned to his studio in upstate New York. “It was easy enough that one or two people could run it with no problem. It was tight.”

In early February, Free Speech TV was scheduled to go on the road with the Cybercar for the first time, taking it on a two-week tour of several Southern states in conjunction with the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It's plan was to use the Cybercar's external video screen to show people footage from the forum and videotape their reactions and comments for a series of monthly specials that will air on Dish Network.

According to the agreement between Free Speech and DCTV, the Cybercar will be shared between the two broadcasters in alternating three-month blocks. It will also be available for rent at a day rate of approximately $5,000, depending on the crew and equipment requirements of the shoot. With two GlobeCasters onboard, the Cybercar can accommodate up to a 15-camera production. It is also equipped with a broadband Internet connection and the digital KU-band satellite uplink system from British Telecom.

In the newly renovated master control room, the innards of the 4'x6' Sacco LED videoscreen are protected by a sheet of Plexiglass (left). The videoscreen is viewable from the exterior of the bus.

Alpert dreams of someday using the satellite system to create a dialog between Americans and their world brethren. In fact, he has had discussions with the president of Cuba about taking the Cybercar to Cuba to create a video dialog between Americans and Cubans, and he recently had to abandon a similar trip to Iraq because of the possibility that war would start before the Cybercar arrived in Baghdad.

In January, DCTV hired a full-time Cybercar manager, and plans are already underway for a multi-city national tour this spring that would allow young people to speak up about gun violence. In 2004, Alpert hopes to take the Cybercar to all 50 states in a Speak Up campaign geared around the presidential elections.

From covering an election in an old plumbing truck to touring the country in a state-of-the-art Cybercar, Alpert's dream has come a long way in the last 30 years. It's no surprise that he's thrilled with the progress. “I'm very proud to show [the Cybercar] to people. We could have built a better bus if we had more money,” says Alpert, estimating the value of the Cybercar at $1 million. “Even so, I don't think there's a better production vehicle in the country.”

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