Promo for my department at Newsday
Monday was a day of adventure for me.
On my first day at Newsday I invited my boss to get in the car with me, tried Sushi (and other Japanese foods) for the first time and took a camera through Schmitt’s Farm’s Haunted House… all of which seems benign on the surface.
My boss offered to take me and my Suffolk counterpart, Erin Geismar, out to lunch. Where did we go? A sushi restaurant on South Oyster Bay Road.
I offered to drive, which was really more of an adventure for Carl as I have spent the last few months learning and utilizing strategies to help me chase fires and keep up with police cars. Of course, I dialed back my use of those driving methods significantly but he still seemed quite on edge. For the record, Erin said she was fine and that my driving was perfectly sound.
We were seated immediately and being a ‘noob’ to sushi I followed Carl’s lead on what to order. They brought me a meal that consisted of long, deep-fried chicken sticks, California rolls and some other Japanese cuisine I didn’t recognize… oh yeah… and chop sticks. I have never had sushi, nor any other Japanese food and as a result never learned to eat with chop sticks.
As one can imagine, lunch was pretty comical.
Erin and I had originally planned to go straight from lunch to the farm and since Carl came to lunch in the same car, we all went to do the story together. Talk about anxiety… I hadn’t interviewed anybody or done any kind of real reporting since June. Here I am reporting for the first time in four months and my boss is watching my every move.
Murphy’s Law took hold of my first story. My wireless mic system hadn’t been used in several months and the batteries had run so low that they weren’t doing well outdoors. Luckily, the good people at Schmitt’s provided me with 9-volts to help get the job done. After that it was just the anxiety of sounding good when asking questions. Erin did much of the talking during the interviews. I occupied myself with framing shots and looking around for B-Roll. As the day went on Erin and I observed that Carl really enjoyed being out in the field as opposed to in the office. He repeatedly took the camera from me and would run to get awesome shots through the grass and corn stalks. He even engineered an opportunity for us to follow a family through a corn maze and conducted an impromptu interview during the tractor ride back to the front of the farm.
That was cool. I was standing on the step of a moving tractor, shooting an interview with a woman and a little girl as Carl asked them questions that yielded nice sound bites.
My first Newsday video. Shot at Schmitt’s Farm
After spending a couple of hours shooting at the farm we returned to the newsroom where Erin and I planned for our 7:30 p.m. return for the haunted house. She was a real trooper. Erin expressed some concern with going through the haunted house. I spent the day ribbing her about how “scary” it was going to be.
When we went through it the first time I opted not to use the camera’s night vision. I was hoping to have enough of a “glow” eminating from all of the important parts of the house that I’d be able to use the house’s native lighting to bring viewers the full effect. No go.
I told Erin that I wanted to go through a second time with the night vision turned on. She sighed, pondered and then agreed. The second time through came out much better… Plus, being able to see the house through the camera kept me from walking into walls, which was something I was plagued by the first time through.
Comedy, ice breaking, fright fest, photography… A perfect first day.
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