Elice Giorgione
A&E Assistant
Professor Stan Thomas has worked in more countries than many of us have ever been to on vacation – South Africa, Greece, Russia, Egypt and the United States. In addition to teaching two sections of video field production here at Pepperdine, he also works in the entertainment industry doing slow-motion replay for the local networks’ coverage of sporting and entertainment events.
In the past, Thomas has worked on telecasts for the Dodgers, Angels, Lakers, Clippers, Ducks, Kings and many of the colleges in the area. He has held positions with ESPN, Fox Sports, ABC, NBC, CBS and TNT, and as a result, has worked on a number of very important sporting events including the Super Bowl, NBA Finals, NHL Finals, the World Series and even the Badminton Championship in Anaheim. He has also lived any celebrity fanatic’s dream.
“On the entertainment side, I have worked on the Golden Globes, the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys and the MTV Movie Awards,” he said.
Thomas grew up in Portales, N.M. and later in life spent time living and working in South Africa until “the country became very unstable,” and he and his wife and children decided to return to the United States.
“There were openings working at Court TV in New York or a position at Pepperdine,” he said. “I came out to California, and it just felt like home.”
He first came to Pepperdine in 1998, where he worked as a full time faculty member for one year. He then returned to Pepperdine last semester to teach telecommunications classes as an adjunct professor.
“Not only does he just teach the material to us,” said junior Jamie Rokus.“He is constantly out on the job doing various production work for different things.”
It was while Thomas was traveling with ESPN to cover Sunday Night Baseball and Sunday Night Football that he worked with a director who had also directed events at previous Olympic games.
“About a year and a half before this year’s Olympics, he contacted me to see if I would be interested in working with him at the Olympics in Greece,” Thomas said. “I thought about it for about three seconds and told him of course I would be interested.”
Thomas was hired to do slow-motion replay at the indoor volleyball venue in Piraeus, a harbor located south of Athens. The games he worked on began one day after opening ceremonies and continued until the close of the Olympics, which made for a very busy schedule.
“Our crew had to broadcast six matches per day for the first ten days, then four matches per day for two days and then two matches per day for the remaining four days,” he said.
The company that hired Thomas in Greece was called the AOB (Athens Olympic Broadcasting).
“Every time the Olympics are held, the host country puts together a broadcast company that is in charge of all the television broadcasts from each venue,” he said. This practice saves each visiting country the hassle of having to bring their own equipment from all over the world in order to provide coverage to their home networks. “The AOB had to make each event, even the early games, available for any country or broadcast facility that wanted it.”
Thomas said his Olympic experience was a positive one, despite concerns about the venues being ready on time.
“I think that Greece put on a very good Olympics despite all of the bad press they were getting before the games began,” Thomas said. “I didn’t hear of any venue that wasn’t working 100 percent. The trains ran on time as did the events.”
In addition to the games in Athens and other big sporting events, Thomas has also worked on a number of projects that took him out of the country. In 1987 he visited the Soviet Union to partake in a documentary program about the travels of 25 American students from Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
Before returning to the United States from Russia, he worked in Egypt on a number of news stories about agricultural research.
Then, in 1988, he moved with his wife to South Africa and started a family. While there, he worked for a number of TV companies and started his own production company in Johannesburg where he worked until his family relocated to Southern California.
With a wealth of real world experience from all over the world to apply to his teaching methods, Thomas is able to give his students a very realistic, practical view of the industry they are studying.
“I like when teachers have first hand stories about the actual field they are teaching,” Rokus said.
And although all of his work outside of Pepperdine keeps him “pretty busy,” whenever he has spare time, Thomas said he likes to “read and ride my bike — but not at the same time.”
09-23-2004
