First News Show of 2013

        This week I did a news package on the flu epidemic in America. When I reflect on the production of this story, the saying "we make plans and God laughs" immediately comes to mind.
Originally I had made arrangements to shoot at a doctor's office and interview a nurse there named Heather. I also had set up an interview time for a student on campus named Alex. He was hit bad with the flu the first two weeks of school.  Dr. Bradford suggested I speak to Nurse Betty as well so I went down to the clinic to speak with her, however there had been a death in the family and she was not able to meet with me in enough time. So I wrote my script with the intent to use Heather and Alex's interviews with B-roll from Heather's doctor's office.
         I met with Alex on a Monday afternoon and everything went smoothly. All I needed was Heather's pieces. Sounds great right? Well the morning of the shoot, Heather goes M.I.A. She is unavailable and will not answer my calls. I call the office and she is not in. I panicked. I called Austen to tell him without this nurse I have nothing. I called Nurse Betty to see if there was anyway she could see me and she apologized and said she couldn't meet with me until the following Thursday (this of course meant my package wouldn't make deadline). So I scrambled around and went through my Facebook friends and my phone contacts to see if I could figure out a way to get a medical professional to agree to an interview. Luckily, my friend hooked me up. She's a receptionist at a pediatrician's office and managed to get a Doctor to set an appt. with me. I was so thankful. However, when I got to the doctor's office it was a ghost town. I thought how am I going to get B-roll when there's not a single person waiting in this lobby?! Still, I got the interview. I was thankful he agreed on such short notice, but as you can see in my package he is a little cooky (making jokes about something so serious).
          Afterwards, I re-wrote the script to fit what he had discussed and for my "opening" B-roll, I used several clips from various news stations to emphasize how widespread the flu was. Not exactly how I would have done a segment had I been a reporter for a real news program, but without press badges and a nifty title I tried to make the best out of the situation.
Total hours: 5