TV Production teacher Robert Schick listens for the count down as he prepares for the camera to start rolling. He aims the lens toward the news anchor and prepares for the day’s newscast. This is not the JCTV newsroom in the art wing though. This is KVAL news in Eugene, Oregon in the year 1985 and Schick is working on his first job in television.

When Schick was in college at the University of Oregon, he decided to major in telecommunications and film. In college, Schick said he would make short films in his class with 8mm cameras and make newscasts. He also learned to do other media jobs like radio. When Schick  got out of college he got a job at KVAL.

While at KVAL, Schick did many of the jobs his TV production students do now to create their broadcast.  Schick would run the camera, switch shots, work the teleprompter, and be a floor director. Schick worked there for a while  and then moved onto working in the movie business.

Schick got into movies around 1988 by meeting a young woman  associated with a few people in Chicago who were in the movie business. He figured that the pay was much better for movies than news-casting , so he decided to go back to Chicago to start his movie career. When Schick first started in movies, he was an assistant to the director doing simple tasks like getting food, telling actors when they were on, and controlling the traffic. Schick eventually ended up at DGA or  the Directors Guild of America which is a collection of movie directors that functions like a union.

Schick’s first job in the movie business was being a production assistant on the set of “Men Don’t Leave.” Schick worked on a lot of famous movies such as “The Fugitive”, “The Replacements”, and “The River Wild”.  He said  his two favorite movies that he worked on were “The River Wild” and “Severed Ties.” Schick liked the “River Wild” “because we  shot in the most beautiful place I have ever been in: the Kooteani river in Montana. ” Shick said. His other favorite movie to work on, “Severed ties,”  “was a very cheesy B-movie that was fun because the crew was very young,” Schick said.  A full list of all the movies Schick worked on can be found on IMDB.com by looking up Robert Schick in the search bar.

After about twelve years of working in the movie and News  business, Schick finally wanted to settle down. Since he had a young daughter and a wife, he had to leave for filming. He could go without seeing his family for up to twelve months while he was working on set. He decided to settle down in Maryland and work as a teacher at JC. Schick now applies a lot of the tools and skills he learned to his TV production students. They do many of the same jobs he would have done when he first started at KVAL news in Eugene, Oregon. “I try to do things the way we used to do it, just on a smaller scale,” Schick said.

Cole Alban is a reporter for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.