Who’s ready for Halloween?
It’s only a few days away, so this past weekend, we wanted to know: What are this year's most popular costumes in the Rochester area?
One of my jobs here at 13 WHAM is to run the Assignment Desk on the weekends, which means in addition to helping plan what stories are covered for the day and making sure we get all the latest breaking news, I set up a lot of the interviews you see in our 6 and 11 shows.
As she does every time she anchors, on Sunday, Rachel had a bunch of story ideas. Among plenty of more serious and pressing suggestions, popular Halloween costumes was one of them.
We planned on doing this story in the form of a VoSot.
A VoSot?
You see them on the news everyday, but you may not have known what they were called. When the anchor is telling a story over video, and then we show someone else—an expert, a person on the scene, the subject of a story, etc.—talking in front of the camera as part of the story, that’s a VoSot. The word itself is a combination of Voiceover and Sound on Tape. You typically see 3-4 of these in a regular newscast. (Check out the video, and you'll see what I mean.)
So I set up an interview with Jason McFiggins, a manager at Spirit Halloween in Greece, to tell us what was up.
According to Jason, this year’s most popular costumes are:
--Star Wars Characters
--Super Mario Bros.
--Lady Gaga
--Alice in Wonderland
Any surprises there?
This got me thinking—if these are the most popular costumes, you’re going to be seeing them everywhere. I take this as a list of what you don’t want to be for Halloween. It’s a list of what everyone else is going to be.
It means that no matter where you are, you’re going to run into a Luigi. And if you’re Luigi, you’re most likely with a Mario, who’s going to be wearing the same thing as the other Luigi’s Mario. Even if you win a costume contest, you’re going to have to split the prize four ways. It’s only fair. You’re all brothers now.
So now that we know what everyone else is dressing up as, what are you going to be?
I would love to hear your costume ideas, especially if you think you’ve got a really original one. Even better, if you have it all together, send me a picture!
You can e-mail your ideas, pictures, questions, suggestions or whatever to rmaguire@13wham.com.
I’m on Twitter, too: www.twitter.com/ryjmag
--Ryan
