Until this year Duluth schoolteacher Caroline Raville's experience in front of the camera consisted strictly of Christmas morning family videos.
Yet her aunt wasn't surprised when the loquacious Raville ended up hosting a national television show as her entry level TV job. "Honey," Raville was told, "I just knew someone, someday, would pay you to talk."
Raville, 29, who teaches eighth-grade language arts at Gwinnett's Louise Radloff Middle School, began taping segments as co-host of "This American Land" at the end of the school year.
The PBS show, produced in Atlanta by a team of former CNN staffers, premieres in August. (The series will be made available to Atlanta stations WPBA and GPB.) Most of the members of the team are alumni of the Environment Unit at CNN, and have long experience producing features and news stories that focus on conservation, science, the environment and the natural world.
The weekly magazine-style show will include up to seven segments in a half-hour format, with contributions from public television stations around the country. Some topics that the first few shows will cover include uranium mining in New Mexico, the return of the bison to the western prairies and zombie subdivisions in Idaho.
Holding it all together are co-hosts Bruce Burkhardt, a 14-year CNN veteran who worked on the "Earth Matters," and Raville. Executive producer Gary Strieker, who traveled the globe creating the "Our Planet" series at CNN, said what Raville lacks in television experience she more than makes up for in her ability to mesmerize a room full of 14-year-olds.
"She’s got a great presence," he said, "a combination of looks, attitude and general overall moxie."
Strieker moved from Atlanta to the mountains of southern Colorado several years ago, where he lives above a world-class trout stream, but he and his team assemble and edit their segments and work together using fast internet connections.
The Atlanta members of the group assembled in front of a wall-sized flat-screen recently at Biscardi Creative Media in Duluth, where managing producer Walter Biscardi handles post-production in a facility outfitted like a 1950s soda shop. They watched appreciatively as the snappy, percussive theme music (by Atlanta composer Patrick Belden) played over scenes of bats, bighorn sheep, surging oceans and soaring mountains.
While "This American Land" plans to send the co-hosts farther afield in future episodes, the only scary Mutual-of-Omaha-style wildlife they've encountered so far are hornets that attacked Biscardi while they shot lead-ins this month at Vogel State Park.
The tall, golden-haired Raville and the whiskered, avuncular Burkhardt have a complementary energy onscreen, and seem to enjoy each other.
Though Raville is the newcomer (she was in fifth grade while the rest of the team was working on "Earth Matters") she is not shy about speaking up, nor unmindful of the opportunity in front of her. The team will shoot around her school schedule, using holidays and other breaks.
"I have said to myself, ‘How did I get here?’" said the Auburn graduate. "It is a privilege to work with true journalists who are about finding truth and telling stories. I’m proud to be a part of it."
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