Milwaukee PBS readies a COVID-19-safe ‘Letters to Santa’
Even COVID-19 can’t keep Santa Claus from these appointed rounds.
Since the 1970s, the fat man with the long white beard has been stopping at WMVS-TV (Channel 10) every year around Christmastime for “Letters to Santa.” Usually, the show, produced by students, is pure old-school television: Santa spends time with local kids, who tell him what they want for Christmas. It either aired live or was shot live on tape.
The pandemic has put many of Milwaukee’s traditional Christmas events on the shelf, but there was no talk of canceling “Letters to Santa,” said Kevin Pulz, executive producer for student television programming at Milwaukee PBS and program coordinator for television and video production at Milwaukee Area Technical College, which owns Milwaukee’s public TV operation.
“It’s the (biggest) broadcast project, the only student project that airs on Channel 10,” Pulz said. “… It was more of a question of how we could do it, and being safe and connecting kids with Santa.”
The student producers of this year’s installments of “Letters to Santa,” airing at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 21 through 24 on Channel 10, set out to do both.
Socially distant Santa
For ideas on how to pull that off, Pulz, who has overseen production of the show since 2007, reached out to past student producers of the show for ideas to offer the 2020 student crew.
“They kind of gave me a template of a sort,” said Brian Kenney, student executive producer of “Letters to Santa.”
The device they developed was to have Santa work with Jolly the Postmaster Elf, who runs the post office receiving letters for St. Nick. The set provided plenty of space between Jolly and Santa for proper social distancing, but the camera operator used depth of field to make it look like they were closer together than they really were.
The set never had more than two performers on it at a time.
The kids’ interactions with Santa were all done via Zoom: “Santa was saying how used to that element he is … and it actually seemed so normal,” Kenney said.
In addition to those interactions, the “Letters to Santa” crew created other bits that were different from the traditional show. For example, a Santa mail pilot named Amelia Elfhart chats from her plane, via green screen.
Adding sketches to the show forced the student creators/producers to be more creative in their scriptwriting. “This year, there is some of the most clever stuff I’d seen,” Pulz said.
Another 2020 addition is a set of “postcards” — short video holiday greetings to Milwaukee from more than a dozen Milwaukee notables, from Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone to Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Brandon Woodruff.
Shifting from live production
About 24 of the program’s advanced students were involved in the “Letters to Santa” production this year, along with some beginning students and others, like actors, brought in to help.
Filming for the show was a challenge, not just because of social-distancing requirements but because of the turnover. Kenney said some students dropped out of the project because of COVID, others just because of the stress of 2020.
“I give a lot of credit to the actors,” Kenney said. “They all did a really good job on very short notice.”
MATC’s TV production program is known for live shows — productions either aired live or shot live and largely unedited. So the mix of produced segments and filmed-live scenes for “Letters to Santa” was a different situation.
“As stressful as the live shows are, doing more (in postproduction) was even more stressful,” Kenney said.
Kenney, who had been elected to the executive producer role by members of his class in September, and the rest of the student crew spent 21⁄2 weeks in postproduction to get the shows ready in time for Christmas.
“It was nice to see everything come together,” Kenney said, “because not many things have” this year.
“It’s the (biggest) broadcast project, the only student project that airs on Channel 10 … It was more of a question of how we could do it, and being safe and connecting kids with Santa.”
Kevin Pulz Executive producer for student television programming at Milwaukee Area Technical College