Day 4(1/6/18) *Atlanta/Free Day*

In the CNN mock production room!

Lizzo/Charlie Puth/Jason Derulo free concert!

Welcome to day 4! Today was a free day/time to work on our projects. So Nadine, Kelsey, Melanie, and I went to Starbucks in downtown Atlanta to work on stuff for the morning(it was a great way to people watch and get to know the Atlanta population😎, too!), and then spent the rest of the day exploring the city.

After completing our work for the day at Starbucks, we went on a tour of the CNN building-that was really interesting. It focused mainly on the production of the show, so we got to see people at work in a big news room gathering information to create stories, we saw news anchors and live shots of shows, we learned about the various roles on the set(and how stressful it must be to hold any one of these roles), green screen technology, and costs of production. I was shocked to learn that just one camera on a news set costs $300,000 and the average set will have 3-5 of these cameras in use per show! Hopefully the cameraman doesn’t spill his/her coffee on the job (😂). 

We also learned lots about the building itself: the CNN building used to be a hotel that housed a full-size ice rink! It also houses the world’s longest free-standing escalator…which we found out after we had ridden up it!

From there, we met up with Sara and had a quick lunch before heading over to Centennial olympic park to attend a free concert(some kind ladies at the Starbucks told us about it-it’s a part of the college football championships happening here at the moment). It was 30 degrees and the concert was outside, but hey, it was free, so why not! We got stage-side spots at 4:30pm and hung out until about 6:30pm until the concert began (1st was Lizzo, then Charlie Puth, and then Jason Derulo, but we only stayed for the first two because we were freezing). We could not really walk back to catch our uber because our feet had quite literally frozen and we couldn’t move them as usual…but it was worth it :) We got to know each other better and had lots of fun singing along to our favorites by both artists!

Now I’m very tired after a great day in the city(and my toes are still cold several hours later!), and am looking forward to tomorrow, in which we’ll hear from the first “expert group” in our class.

Goodnight!

-Anna

CNN tour :)

We saw an example of a "complete street"(i.e. one with a traffic lane and a bike/walk lane), something a speaker had told us about in his talk yesterday!