For more than three decades, Kristian Berg has been working for PBS stations—16 of those years have been with WPSU. While his career in television was sparked by an 8mm movie camera, his love for public media developed while working as a producer on Newton’s Apple for a PBS station in St. Paul, Minnesota. Kristian said the show encouraged a creative approach to making science fun and interesting for a general audience, and he fell in love with the creative freedom it introduced.
Kristian was recently inducted into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Silver Circle Society, which honors individuals for significant contributions made while working in the television industry for 25 years or more.
Congratulations on being inducted into the Silver Circle of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. You have been in the industry for more than 36 years. Go back to the beginning, what inspired you to pursue a career in television?
When I was a kid, one of my friend’s dad had an 8mm movie camera, so I asked him to help me make a movie with some of the neighborhood kids as my actors. He shot the first two and then I got my own movie camera. We made soundtracks with a portable cassette recorder, timing the lines as we watched. It just felt natural. I loved telling stories in the medium.
What do you feel has been your best story, the one where you feel you and your team were called into the business to contribute to, or a moment when the television industry was called to step up to deliver important content, and did?
It would be difficult to name only one.
STEM education and inspiration is where I’ve done the most work. Lots of stories of kids doing science, mostly short and fun educational segments, early on for broadcast but more recently online.
The most challenging work has been making historical documentaries dealing with social justice and the history of native peoples. I did a lot of work with Dakota Sioux communities in the upper Midwest during the 1990s.
At WPSU, I am able to work with Penn State researchers who are straightforward about climate change and are taking action to help communities shrink their carbon footprints and adapt for an uncertain future, which is documented in Managing Risk in a Changing Environment.
You mentioned working with the late Betty White, actress, comedian, and a long-time advocate for animal rights. Can you share more about that experience?
While producing the PBS series Newton’s Apple, we filmed segments with celebrities called “Science of the Rich and Famous” in which an annoying autograph seeker would bug a celebrity in the middle of some activity. For example, the autograph seeker goes out onto the ice to interrupt American figure skater and Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton mid-spin to explain and demonstrate angular momentum, the science of spinning. Betty White was known for her love of animals, so she gets to tell us how cats purr. It was shot in the Beverly Hilton hotel, and we brought in a mama cat with a litter of nursing purring kittens, which we hid on set for her to reveal. Betty was great—she liked my script and contributed some fun ad libs. The best ones usually improved my writing during the shoot. I made sure I saved Betty’s autograph!
For those who may not have the chance to go behind the scenes of a television production, can you talk about the many important elements of this medium and how they need to come together for a project to work?
One of the most important elements of a production is the story itself and whether it lends itself to the medium. Lots of unsuccessful productions would have been better served as a podcast, a book, or a radio story. For television, you need to think ahead about what you are going to show in video, who is going to speak on camera? Can your interviewees carry the entire program, or will there be a narrator? How many production and post-production days are budgeted? Can the project afford professional talent? What rights need to be secured to imagery and music? How much research, production, and editing time will you need? All these questions need to be considered.
Can you share something about the level of teamwork it takes to pull this work together—whether it be a quick turnaround based on an event or a production that may take years to come to fruition?
Several times at WPSU, I’ve been part of teams that worked for years to bring about and sustain broadcast and digital series. WPSU Producer Cheraine Stanford and I witnessed participants of a summer camp focused on research test middle school genetics and genealogy curriculum developed by Penn State professor Nina Jablonski and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots. We were excited by its educational potential. Kids were using their own genetics and family histories as inspiration for learning. We thought a video series showing the camp in action would be valuable for teachers, but it was impossible to record the research camps because their subjects had to be kept anonymous. So, we put together a budget and convinced them to run a separate camp solely for the cameras. By the next summer, a diverse group of 13 middle school–aged students representing different backgrounds, regions, and family situations came to be part of the camp. We recorded their activities with two cameras and equipped each kid with their own digital audio recorder to be sure every voice was heard. Having 15 different tracks of audio made the editing laborious, but the result was an engaging and popular series called Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings. On the last day of camp, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., flew in to surprise the kids and hear what they had learned. The producers of his national PBS series used our footage in a special Finding Your Roots episode and, in the story, Dr. Gates commented on how our shared past can bring us all closer together.
What has been your favorite moment working in this business and why?
My favorite moment was passing a travel guitar around a campfire in Kenya on safari with Penn State students when the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (H.E.S.E.) students took their sustainable energy and business ideas to share with Kenyan people. Beyond the fire, we could see the eyes of animals glowing in the darkness. My videographer Ben Webb and I spent 10 days documenting the students’ work for a Global Penn State: Kenya promo and we edited a half-hour show that aired on the Big Ten Network. It was meaningful to see students use their knowledge for good and experience firsthand the realities of people in the developing world.
One of the more bizarre yet rewarding experiences was when we made the Nittany Lion Shrine come to life. From first pitch to completion, it took me five years. When I first saw the lion shrine in person, I thought if the statue came to life and broke free of its stone bonds, it would be the perfect metaphor for students earning their degrees regardless of location or circumstance. The vision took finding a few collaborators to help bring it to fruition, including a visual effects company from Los Angeles. It debuted during a home game on the jumbotron at Beaver Stadium. The spot aired on television during Penn State football games, and the next fall, it won a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award.
On the side, I am currently producing an independent documentary called Sammo about a brilliant young jazz musician named Sam Miltich from my hometown in northern Minnesota who burst onto the music scene while still in high school but was diagnosed with adult-onset schizophrenia at age 22. He is now coming out publicly as a mental health advocate, and we are making this film to reduce the stigma of mental illness and offer a message of hope that recovery is possible.
Can you talk about the importance of public media and the role it has played in your life?
When I first applied for a producer position on the PBS science series Newton’s Apple at Twin Cities Public Television, it was because they encouraged creative approaches to make science fun and interesting for a general audience. I didn’t have a science background, but this creative freedom was a big carrot, and I found I loved the work. When the WPSU position opened, I thought Penn State would be a good fit.
I had worked at two very large public media stations before WPSU but never one that was an outreach service of a major university. Really, the land-grant mission is completely compatible with that of public media. The ability to share educational materials with teachers and disseminate research information through storytelling is not easily replaced. A number of my educational projects such as Science-U at Home, Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings, and Mission: Materials Science, produced in partnership with, respectively, the Eberly College of Science, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Technology, all have collections on PBS Learning Media, making videos and classroom resources freely available to over one million registered teachers across the country.
My recent short documentary Healing the Red Mo highlights the work of community activists, engaged students, and researchers battling the environmental plague of acid mine drainage. It now streams on WPSU Digital and PBS Passport and highlights the value of Penn State having a conduit to a national audience. Public media is all about service, and I hope it can continue.