In the past couple of weeks, The Wolfcast has been off air due to renovations. They plan on coming back around Feb. 5 with new technology and better communication.

The renovations are supposed to be helping the cast with communication between each “team.” Broadcast teacher, Jim Tarvin, and The Wolfcast crew, have invested around $6,000 into the new technology, called IFBs, or interruptible foldback.

“[With the IFBs] students will see better quality in the shows,” Tarvin said. “We won’t have to stop and fix things, we will be able to correct on the way. In the past if someone is scratching their jewelry or making noise on the set, we’d just have to stop the show, but now we can tell them to stop so we can keep filming. We can now make professional corrections without having to stop.”

While the IFBs will help the cast correct mistakes right away, it will also lead them to be able to create more live shows.

“Right now when we do live shows there are so many things that can go wrong, and it can be hard to recover from,” Tarvin said. “I feel like with the extra communication, we will be able to do more live productions.”

Director and junior Camryn Martinez who is in charge of making sure the show runs smoothly and writing scripts, believes that the IFBs will help greatly with her job and making sure the show is produced well.

“We haven’t had televisions up in the studio recently, so for highlights we had to make the person working on cameras que people, and with the IFBs we will be able to just say ‘Hey next highlight is on’ so the person can talk about the highlights as they are playing,” Martinez said. “If a camera angle is wrong we can say something about that right away and if someone says someones name wrong we have the ability to say ‘Hey it’s actually this name,’ and they can correct themselves without us having to stop the show.”

Executive producer and senior Julien Mallet also likes that the new technology will help them with more live shows.

“I kind of oversee everything, so the renovations are especially helpful for me,” Mallet said. “It’s going to be a lot easier to just get the shows off and everything. For the people on air they’ll be able to see what’s going on in the control room, which will make it a lot easier for them and hopefully move us towards more live shows.”

Both Martinez and Mallet are apprehensive about some of the renovations.

“I worked as an unofficial intern over the summer at a news studio and they used the same sort of technology we are getting, but just a higher quality, and the anchor was able to hear everything going on in the control room and was still able to keep talking,” Martinez said. “The system that we will be using will allow us to turn on and off the talents so that we can talk in the control room without them hearing us, but it’s a little scary because if someone forgets to turn off the button it could mess someone up.”

Mallet is more concerned about the amount of time The Wolfcast will lose due to the renovations.

“They’re limiting the number of shows we can have this semester, so people are kind of falling out of practice and people’s projects won’t be able to be put on the show,” Mallet said.

While these renovations have been going on, the students of Wolfcast have been focusing on their projects and course selection videos, 37 of which were new this year.

“The segment team is still working on music reports and word of the week,” Tarvin said. “They are all continuing their work, and other people are producing sports specials. We still have people working every day in the control room, running cable or helping to get the renovations done. We’ve also spent a lot of time working on course selection videos.”

Martinez showed enthusiasm for the new technology being brought into The Wolfcast.

“With it being so new is exciting,” Martinez said. “The fact that we are advancing to almost a professional broadcast is awesome. For me, since I do want to go into that field, it’s really exciting, and for the people who are on the edge, this technology might push them towards that kind of career. I feel like the new equipment is going to make it cooler, so more people will come in and maybe decide if this is something they want to do in the future.”