With all the opportunities I’ve been given at school they often come with a catch… That catch being, I can’t talk about it until after it has aired. I have been keeping four events on the DL.
The first tv show I was able to witness being filmed is a new TV show on USA called Real Country. In this show, three judges (Shania Twain, Jake Owen, and Travis Tritt) each bring in an artist they feel has major talent. In round one the audience votes out of the 3 as to which two should move onto the next round a guest judge comes out and the top 2 performers perform and the audience and the guest judge determines who wins the episode. For this show, you had to obtain a ticket via a website and then you were told what to wear style-wise. Then you wait in a line and the producers etc place you in different areas. These different areas are where you will be for the filming of the show. Once everyone gets into the filming area they go over rules. The rules were basically no filming, always smile and pay attention as to what others are doing around you. Then the hype man came out and told us when he claps to clap and to hoot and holler and when he stops to stop as well. When filming began the host came out and read off the teleprompters. One was behind the judges and the other was near the camera. He read off those instead of memorizing lines. They would do multiple takes of him reading off the teleprompter as well as introducing the contestants and telling us when voting began and stopped!
The second tv appearance was for the CMT Female artist of the year! I was an audience member for this and had to wear a formal black dress. We also had to go to the location of where the event was held 24 hours in advance to get our wristband stating that we could be at the televised event. This was a live showing so it was very much different from the filming of the tv show. We were allowed to take photos but they could only be posted AFTER the award show had ended. I enjoyed this event so much not only because it was all about the woman but it also was all one take so what you saw on tv was not edited.
Number three was CMT Country Christmas! This recently aired actually! But the secret is… it was filmed in September! This was very similar to the filming of Real Country. Multiple takes were done which got a little tiresome but that is show biz! One cool thing though was in order to fill the seats near the stage they took us students and used us! So I got moved to the floor and the top of my head was on TV! The one thing that was cool about this filming though was we could take photos and videos and post them to social media instantly so there were no secrets as to what I was doing! The other really fun thing about CMA Country Christmas was it was filmed at my school where we have our basketball games so they transformed our basketball court into a winter wonderland!
The last filming I attended was the CMA Awards! This was truly a dream come true! It was a very strict dress code wise. We had to wear all black but couldn’t wear anything that may have us stand out more than the artist. We had to go to a meeting telling us the rules and to have our outfit approved. I was placed in what is called the pit. It was in the back of the arena where artists Luke Combs and Thomas Rhett performed. We were not allowed to have our phones out at all until after the show. If we saw an artist we were not to speak to them either. But overall the experience of being able to be in the same room as all these talented artists were mind-blowing!
My experiences have been overall amazing and ones that I will forever be cherishing. They were some of the top things that happened during my first semester at Belmont.