 Video
Works Staff
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John
Paul
Senior Producer
John Paul is the former news director at WCIA-TV, Champaign, where he
worked as a reporter, weekend anchor, assistant news director, and news
director for 23 years. John says that after working in a hectic newsroom
environment, he’s enjoying the more long-term projects he’s working
on for WILL-TV. He’s always found producing to be one of the most
enjoyable aspects of working in television, he says. He was executive
producer for WCIA’s "After the Storm," a documentary about a
series of central Illinois tornadoes in 1996. The documentary won best
downstate television documentary in the 1997 Illinois Associated Press
awards for broadcast news. A graduate of the University of Illinois with
a degree in Radio and Television, John also teaches broadcast journalism in the UI College of Communications.
Jeff Cunningham
Editor
In another life, Jeff Cunningham worked in a bank as a farm manager. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981 with a degree in Agricultural Economics with the dream of becoming a farmer. In 1985, after a undergoing a premature mid-life crisis during the farm crisis, he began a subsequent career in TV/video production as a production assistant at WILL-TV and a news cameraman at WICD-TV/Champaign. He took a full-time job as an associate producer at WILL-TV in 1988, helping to produce documentaries on Illinois natural history and folk culture. Two years later he was promoted to writer/producer and earned a Masters of Science degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University. As writer/producer, he created and produced the public affairs discussion program
Talking Point and produced, wrote and hosted the monthly cultural documentary series
Prairie Fire.
Steve Drake
Producer/Videographer
Steve Drake is formerly a producer for the Discovery Channel's series “Assignment
Discovery,” which won the 2004 Emmy for Outstanding Children’s
Series. Before his work on that series, Steve lived in London for three-and-a-half years and worked on a number of television and radio programs for the BBC, including the technology series “The Kit,” the World Service youth-radio series “The Edge,” and the award-winning science documentary series “Horizon.”
Steve majored in political science at the University of California, Irvine, but has been interested in films for as long as he can remember. “Ever since I saw the first Star Wars movie as a kid, I knew I wanted to be involved in film or TV in some way,” said Steve. After graduating, he worked as a fundraiser at the University of California’s Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where he interacted with a number of people directly involved in the film industry. A personal highlight was meeting childhood-hero George Lucas at one of the archive’s costumed fundraisers.
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