Dennis Willis's Blog (10)

Michael Jackson is dead. If we were still producing Soundwaves, Joey Mack and I would likely be scrapping every… Continue

Michael Jackson is dead. If we were still producing Soundwaves, Joey Mack and I would likely be scrapping every… Continue

Tis the season! For the 19th year, Pacifica Community Television and Capricorn Entertainment will present the SOUNDWAVES CHRISTMAS PARTY, a food, clothing and toy drive that has grown from (very) humble beginnings to the centerpiece of our holiday calendar! By "our," I refer to the growing family of friends, colleagues and volunteers that power this noble little fundraiser, a list that grows longer every year. Hence… Continue

It’s Sunday, September 28th as I type this. The final episode has at long last rolled off the Avid onto a master air copy. I still have to create a digital master and DVD master but those are formalities. The final show is done. The series is done. And after five months or producing, scanning and digitizing footage, writing, shooting, and editing the whole mess into a 12-hour story, it feels kind of strange to not have another show to immediately begin working on. It feels awesome and freeing… Continue

It’s kind of hard to believe that the show starts in less than a week. We’ve spent months planning the 25th anniversary season, reviewing hundreds of music videos, writing and shooting shows, compiling the Soundwaves Top 100 and working to keep our big announcement under wraps. We have also embraced Facebook, took classes in Viral Marketing 101 and revamped this very website. And now, with the first four shows completed (seven more to go), a calm has settled on the Soundwaves office. The… Continue

Production continues on Soundwaves’ 25th anniversary season, and I gotta tell you how much fun we’re having! Last week, we shot No. 492 at KGO NEWSTALK 810 AM, which is where I review films on Tuesdays and Fridays. The folks at KGO are just cool, tis’ all. The only glitch was when Gene Burns walked into the middle of our shot! He was preparing to go on the air and we had taken over his studio. But Gene was a cool cat and even apologized to us! We promptly relocated to a smaller recordin… Continue

The promos are in rotation on TV, Facebook and here on SWTV. The Soundwaves Top 100 is almost done being compiled. Three episodes are scripted and one is in the can! Actually, that’s one full episode currently rendering on the Avid and twenty-five minutes of footage that will surface somewhere toward the end of the season. Because this is our 25th anniversary season, we are loading the shows up with some sweet Soundwaves reunions. We shot the first show – No. 491 -- with the great Wayne Hess b… Continue

With a little less than five weeks to go until the launch of the 25th anniversary season of Soundwaves, there is plenty of activity going on as we ramp up. We have 11 shows to shoot and produce, culminating with No. 500 -- and each one is shaping up to be a mini epic. It's actually starting to get a bit daunting when we consider the sheer amount of work ahead of us. But hey -- we have a quarter century of music, hosts and Soundwaves history to cover! One set of shows that comprises the middle t… Continue

To all who have joined the Facebook Soundwaves Group and have ventured over here, I bid you a hearty (and heartfelt) welcome! The next few months will be very exciting 'round these parts and we'd like to share it with all of you. More than that, we want to involve you as much as we can. We have active forums (please comment or start one yourself) and will ask your opinion on subjects like the greatest songs of the past 25 years or where would be a great place to shoot an episode? Also, plan on… Continue

Soundwaves premiered twenty-five years ago today, and man, were things different! Not only were music videos scarce (the only place you could see them was on TV), but not every city had MTV yet. That was certainly the case with Pacifica, which is why our little afterschool request program was able to find an audience and flourish. Before text messaging and email, people used to request songs by calling us on the phone. If we had the song and the time, we'd play it. The show looked like exactly… Continue