LOS ALAMITOS : Picture Brightens for City’s Station

After operating for 15 years on an bare-bones budget, staff members at Los Alamitos Television feel as if they have suddenly landed on easy street.

Though their new studio in a local business park is modest by show-business standards, it is quite a step up from cramped quarters at Los Alamitos High School, where the little public-access station rented space.

For the first time, the station will have a fully equipped van with $70,000 worth of equipment so that live shoots can be done without dismantling the whole studio, trucking it out and reassembling it on site.

“We call ourselves ‘The Little Station That Could,’ ” station manager Dan Smith said. “We’re turning out four times more programming than stations with four times our resources.”

Indeed, a number of its former students have gone on to careers in the TV industry, and two have won Emmys.

Michael Killen won the 1994 award for children’s programming as co-producer “Kids Killing Kids / Kids Saving Kids,” which aired on the CBS and Fox networks.

And former student Peter J. Anninos was a cameraman on the Emmy-winning crew of “Universe: The Infinite Frontier” for KOCE-TV.

Los Alamitos Television broadcasts local news, sports and features, carrying performances by the Orange County High School for the Arts and high school football games.

Sports coverage is so popular that the coach of Los Alamitos High’s Griffins has his own show.

Richard Barnard, station manager for HBTV3, Huntington Beach’s public-access station, said of Los Alamitos Television: “They’re a small station, but the experience I’ve had with them has been real positive.”

The station also provides video instruction to students at the arts high school and offers training in engineering, a realm usually left to experts.

“We are able to get people comfortable with the equipment early on,” said David Smith (no relation to Dan Smith).

An alumnus of the program, David Smith, 20, is now an instructor at the arts high school, a sound-engineering student at Cypress College and a cameraman for a Spanish-language dance program. He designed the sound, electronics, lighting and physical layout of the new studio.

The facility, he said, “offers an open door into an industry that’s usually closed.”