Southeastern Channel wins Emmy for second straight year
Contact: Christina Chapple
12/6/06
CAPTION …
SOUTHEASTERN CHANNEL WINS EMMY – The Southeastern Channel, Southeastern Louisiana University’s education access channel, has won an Emmy for the second straight year. At the Dec. 2 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Suncoast Region awards ceremony in Miami, Rick Settoon of Ponchatoula, left, executive producer and general manager of the Southeastern Channel, and Josh Kapusinski of Hammond, who designed, created and edited the promo, display the coveted statues they received for a promotional spot for the channel’s Florida Parishes history program, “The Florida Parish Chronicles.”
HAMMOND – The Southeastern Channel, Southeastern Louisiana University’s four-year-old educational access channel, has won a coveted Emmy Award for the second straight year.
The channel won for a promotional spot for its award-winning program about the history of the Florida Parishes, “The Florida Parish Chronicles,” in the Program Promotion category for a single spot or campaign.
Rick Settoon of Ponchatoula, executive producer and general manager of the Southeastern Channel, and Josh Kapusinski of Hammond, who designed, created and edited the promo, won Emmys for the production.
The 2006 Emmy winners were announced Dec. 2 in Miami by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The competition included nominees from television stations and production companies in the Suncoast Region, which includes Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Puerto Rico.
The Southeastern Channel was nominated for seven Emmys -- more than any other Louisiana television station, commercial and non-commercial -- and was the only university channel in the region honored with nominations. Other Louisiana stations nominated for an Emmy were WDSU-TV and WWL-TV of New Orleans, KPLC-TV of Lake Charles and Louisiana Public Broadcasting of Baton Rouge.
"Winning an Emmy in the highly-competitive commercial television arena brings great honor to Southeastern and separates the Southeastern Channel from other university television stations," said President Randy Moffett. "This unique accomplishment reflects the exceptional work of the channel staff, the top quality of programming, and the high level of expertise that they pass along to our television students."
“To be recognized as an Emmy winner means that you’ve achieved the highest quality standard in television,” said Settoon. “There were a number of categories that had nominees, but no winners, as projects are judged as to whether or not they meet the Emmy standard of excellence. So winning an Emmy is a tremendous honor for the Southeastern Channel, and it says a lot about the quality of our station.”
“All of the other Emmy winners were from big city commercial television stations with large budgets and staff numbers who’ve been operating for at least 30 years,” said Settoon. “For a university channel in only its fourth year of existence to win an Emmy in such prestigious company is really quite amazing.”
The regional Emmy is the highest honor that local and regional television stations can win since national Emmy competition is open only to those major television channels and networks which broadcast to 75 percent of the national population.
In addition to Settoon and Kpusinski, Southeastern nominees included videographer Steve Kleyle of Covington for editing and Samuel C. Hyde Jr. of Denham Springs, Southeastern’s Ford Chair for Regional Studies and director of the Center for Southeast Louisiana Studies, for writing.
Settoon said that winning clips were played before the 300 in attendance at the Emmy ceremony, and that Kapusinski’s “The Florida Parish Chronicles” promo, featuring innovative New Media approach with two-dimensional cutouts of Louisiana historical figures animated in a three-dimensional space, received strong applause and positive comments afterward.
“Josh is an incredibly talented and gifted artist,” Settoon said. “His style is fresh and creative with cutting-edge, digital editing effects and animation techniques. This particular work has already impressed on a national level, having won a national Telly.”
Kapusinski said that the process of animating and creating movement for the spot, which included everything from steam coming out of a train engine to a man rowing a canoe, was exhausting.
“The spot takes figures and objects from old black and white sketches and puts them into a three-dimensional landscape -- an old pastel map of Louisiana,” Kapusinski said. “The figures then interact with each other.”
“I tried to make everything in the spot have some form of movement to bring the environment to life and enhance the replay value if someone missed something the first time,” Kapusinski said.
Last year the Southeastern Channel won the only Emmy awarded to a university television station in the “Student Program” category, a documentary short about longtime Southeastern baseball coach John Stephenson produced by student Jason Shane.
The Southeastern Channel has won more than 40 national and international awards in the past year-and-a-half. The channel can be seen on Charter Cable Channel 18 in Tangipahoa, St. Tammany and Livingston parishes, on Channel 17 in Washington Parish, and online at www.selu.edu/tv.
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