Afternoon viewers of the Austin Music Network may have noticed a curious phenomenon quietly taking hold at the station over the past year.
Since it first went on the air in October, the station's "Hi Fi High School," produced and filmed at Austin's McCallum High School, has become one of the crown jewels in AMN's programming roster. The show's charismatic cast plays music videos and takes viewer calls from its McCallum studio every weekday, turning its once-dead 5 p.m. slot into one of the most popular and entertaining hours on the network.
"Hi Fi" began last year, when the host of AMN's last high school-themed show, "Frankie Goes to High School," graduated in the spring. The network slotted the newly created "Hi Fi" as a replacement and tapped Sam, a McCallum student working at AMN over the summer, to take over as the host of the show. Eventually, the decision was made to expand the show into a fully student-run program, produced as part of a television production class specially formed at McCallum for that purpose. The show has the distinction of being the only broadcast television show in Texas produced solely by high school students, a privilege which has given its cast and crew a unique freedom among students their age.
"We have a teacher, and he's an audio guy, but he really doesn't know anything about television," said "Hi Fi" host and editor Mattie. "And so he just kind of hangs out to make sure we are kind of where we need to be. We are the ones who really make sure there's going to be a team there today. We're the ones who set up interviews, guests and everything."
"We really have very little involvement with the school," Sam said. "We have to put all of our money through the school, and we have to deal with faculty, keep our doors shut when we're being loud. But really we're just based out of the school."
Working on a limited budget with equipment mostly borrowed from AMN, the production constraints of working on "Hi Fi" have forced its students to become jacks-of-all-trades, running sound, operating cameras, editing and compiling footage, producing segments for the show and serving as on-air hosts.
While this sometimes forces the students to take on jobs at which they have little previous experience, necessitating a learning curve which at times can outstrip their ability to keep pace, the many tasks demanded of the "Hi Fi" staff have provided them with an incredibly instructive environment for learning television production.
"There are so many jobs that have to be done," Sam said. "It's such a different thing than most public access. It is student-based, which means we screw up a lot. But that's what we're here for. We're supposed to be able to learn. There's been a lot of bumps in the road, but we're smoothing them out as we go."
Along with the success that "Hi Fi" has brought them, however, has come a devoted corps of phone and e-mail "stalkers," each with their own particular favorite from among the show's female anchors, whom they make regular attempts to contact with varying degrees of lewdness. For this reason, the "Hi Fi" students have asked that we not reveal their last names in this article.
"Sam has been working with AMN for close to a year," director Craig said, "and so ... four months, five months before our show started, she was working on the air. So people saw her, had no idea what age she was. I remember I went over there just to shout out, and I saw people calling her and asking how old she is and asking if they could talk to her."
"We started getting some really creepy calls," said Mattie. "And generally when girls answer the phone, it'll be kind of a creepy call. Somebody would call and be like, 'Can I talk to Sam?' And we'd have to be like, 'She's getting videos ready, sorry.'
"They're not really stalkers, though. I mean, a lot of them are just viewers. Avid viewers."
At the same time, however, the feedback that the "Hi Fi" cast receives on the show has been one of the strongest forces in keeping the students going during a long year of working on the show and learning television production amid their busy school schedules.
"It's been those things that are keeping people like us three alive with the show," Craig said. "I never realized it until today when I was going through all of our stories, promos, bumpers, everything that we have on programming: it's pretty much ... the same people who work every day. And so working over a hundred shows ... It's awesome, but we need something that will keep us going, that will keep us motivated."
"But we could take a little less of the immature calls," Mattie said.
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