A Conversation With ... Steve Hargis

My department produces all of the broadcast projects for Bass Pro Shops. It changes every week, but right now, we have about 40 stores across the country. Commercials are our biggest focus. We do about 450 commercials a year. We also support the corporate needs of anything video – everything from marketing and sales pieces to retail videos – how to fish, how to hunt. We have 19 people, both full- and part-time, working on film and video production … and we use a pretty extensive list of freelance people as well. I work in and for the marketing department.

You’ve been in this job for 20 years; how has technology changed your work?

Computers are everything today. The only thing a computer doesn’t do for us is actually shoot the video, or the film. But once it’s shot, the computer takes over, and it doesn’t leave the computer until it airs on television. We still shoot actual film, but it used to be that you would actually sit there and cut and splice. Film would actually hit the floor, and you’d pick it up … and tape it all in. Today, raw film is transferred to a digital medium, sucked into the computer, and we never look back.

How do you protect your work from system crashes or malfunctions once it’s in the digital format?

It’s like any good system – we have built in a lot of redundancy. Today you can buy either a DVD writer, a CD writer, an external hard drive – there’s no excuse to not have data backed up. In a high-end system like what we use, we have a three terabyte system that’s 100 percent redundant, so if one drive fails, the other 16 drives in the system … pick up and send an e-mail to the administrator … and the guys editing (film and video) never knows that it happened. We’re way past one hard drive that fails and everybody cries in their beer for three days. I’m not saying I’ve never experienced that – that’s one of the reasons that we have such a good system now. We’re shipping three nationally aired hunting and fishing shows every single week … if we have something like that bring us to our knees, we could lose thousands of dollars an hour without that redundant backup.

Do you anticipate a time when your work will be completely digital?

Absolutely. Film is expensive. When you think about 35-millimeter film, that’s what they still shoot movies in. Not all movies of course … and (film) is a beautiful medium. You want to know how technology is changing? The film guys are definitely nervous, because every day, digital technology is getting to the point (that) major motion pictures, they’re starting to think about shooting those in digital. Of course the immediate advantage is “Can I get a playback on that?” and boom, they can play it back, whereas on film, you hope it turns out and you go to the next set. Even one step further … as the scene is being shot, they’re feeding it into the computer, and there’s an editor back there doing a rough edit, so that the director can not only walk over and see the last shot that was filmed, but he can actually look at a rough edit … of whatever it is that he shot … and make tweaks and changes instantly (or) go back out and reshoot … . But there’s still an art to the craft. You still have to understand why this light works and why this light doesn’t work.

Tell us about an unusual project.

A few years back we had a brand-new Bass Tracker boat, and (corporate) said, “What’s a unique way to do this?” and I said, “Why don’t we drop it … right out of the sky and it will land in the water right in front of the fisherman?” They all laughed … but I put everything together and we hired a rigger – which is Hollywood-speak for a guy who makes things drop out of the sky – and we used a 90-foot crane, hoisted that boat 25 feet in the air, rolled on three cameras and dropped that boat not once, but twice. It was a lot of fun, because it really pushed me to the limit of trying to figure out how to get something like that done.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I like to call it a hobby that has become a small business, but JRT Web Design started doing Web sites for nonprofit organizations. And of course, once you do one, the other 1,600 come out of the woodwork, and they’re all worthy. I quickly found myself overwhelmed … I’ve got two or three people who are friends/clients, and it’s kind of a blurry relationship, but I don’t actively seek new people. Bass Pro is my real, full-time job and I love it there, and I love what I do.

Tell us about your family.

My wife, Colleen, is a teacher at Springfield Catholic High School. She teaches, interestingly enough, computer applications and business and accounting, and recently just finished her first semester of teaching … a class that included Photoshop. We have two girls, and they love the outdoors and have grown up fishing with me when they can.[[In-content Ad]]