PROVO — Taking a quick glance at his watch with a breathless sigh, a harried Michael Hunter realizes it's almost 5 o'clock.
Time is no friend of Hunter's today.
No time to relax. No time for sleep.
But it seems there's too much time to think about what could go wrong in the next 15 hours and 30 minutes before the lights go up in the Marriott Center at Brigham Young University.
Each ticking second is precious to Hunter, whose most precious possession at the moment is a purple binder packed with months of notes and new scripts for 12 hours of what he refers to as "The Show."
Hunter, clad in a slightly wrinkled button-down shirt and loosened tie, is charged with producing the television broadcast of BYU's Women's Conference, an event that draws some 20,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the Provo campus.
His job is to send the show via the airwaves to millions of faithful LDS women worldwide who are waiting to hear from such notables as NFL quarterback Steve Young and the LDS Church's General Relief Society president, Mary Ellen Smoot.
Hunter and a ragtag crew made up mostly of students have four hours after the first session ends at 10 a.m. Thursday to wrap up segments for broadcast on KBYU, BYUTV (found on channel 9403 on the Dish Network System), the church's satellite system and a feed to three Internet sites. Friday's broadcasts began at 3 p.m.
"There's no rehearsal time," he says during a stolen moment Wednesday at the Provo offices of KBYU, a public television station sponsored by the LDS Church-owned university. "I hope we do it right the first time."
There's also some added pressure: Eight hours of the conference will be rebroadcast May 6 to churches in Europe and the British Isles for the first time. The audio will be translated into Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
"I'm glad those are delayed," he says. "We have a week to get ready for the European broadcasts."
Jim Bell, executive producer and a manager at KBYU, said nearly all the sessions, even those that won't be included in the global show, will be taped for future use on Channel 11.
"The broadcast takes this event to the world," he said. "Really, the campus can only hold about 30,000 people. This way, we can take it to millions of people."
Last year's Women's Conference, featuring singing legend Gladys Knight, was KBYU's third-highest rated show, earning a 12 rating, a modest success for public television.
It fell behind only a Christmas message from the church's top leaders and a showing of "The American Prophet."
"It is a big draw for our audience," Hunter said, fingering slides of graphics requested by speakers to be shown on the JumboTron-like screens in the Marriot Center, deJong Concert Hall and Pardoe theater during the sessions.
Conference attendees on Thursday morning may not have noticed the silk-smooth transition from pictures to graphic elements to live shots of speakers on the screens during Sister Smoot's talk.
The work was done by a bustling crew in a production truck parked nearby — and it's often not a simple task.
"Sometimes what's going on in the truck is very much in contrast to what's going on inside," Bell said, grinning. "We wouldn't ever say bad words, but it is a hub of activity."
One of Hunter's challenges is to make "good television" out of an event that network channels shun for its religious bent and dearth of enticing, action-packed visual elements.
But producing a ratings blockbuster — say, a show called "How to Marry a Multi-Year Women's Conference Attendee" — isn't his goal.
He wants to capture the spiritual tenor of the event for people tuning in across the globe.
"There's a lot of people in Iowa or Arizona or California who can't make it to the conference but would like to come," he says. "We're just bringing them here. That's what KBYU is all about — taking BYU to the world."