I spent Thursday and Friday of last week in NYC shooting for the NewsHour. Thursday I shot in the Little Haiti section of Brooklyn. We tried to find a restaurant with a large number of Haitians who were effected by the earthquake, but the restaurants were deserted. We ended up at a Haitian radio station where people were gathered to find out information about their family members in Haiti. I shot some b-roll of the radio station and surrounding neighborhood, before getting an interview with the DJ. From there, we headed to the office of the nation's first Haitian city council member and conducted an interview outside of his office.
The producer at NewsHour arranged for us to feed the footage via satellite from a Hispanic TV station in Brooklyn. We got there ten minutes before our scheduled feed time and tried to connect the camera. It didn't work. They tried connecting it to various places in their network, but still no luck. We moved the camera into the control room and kept working on connecting to the satellite while our allotted time expired. Finally they gave up on a digital connection and switched to an analog output. The picture worked right away, but not the sound. They brought out old, scotch taped wires with the rubber stripped off and connected the audio. I quickly started sending the footage, but only one channel of audio was working at a time. I had to switch the audio cables back and forth to send the right channel until all of the footage was sent. It was a horribly nerve wrecking experience that I never want to repeat. I found out later that the people at the TV station had so much trouble connecting the camera, because they had never fed from a camera before. Their lack of experience was, of course, blamed on me.
Friday we shot a local city council meeting where it was announced that city workers could donate money to the relief effort directly from their paychecks. The Haitian city council member, who we interviewed Thursday, broke down crying when he started talking about his family members in Haiti. After the meeting, we went to a community market popular with the Caribbean diaspora. A white woman came and sat with us and told us about how she was sick of the 'white media'. She said that she couldn't read most publications or watch most TV stations because it was biased against people like herself. She went on to tell us about how she went to Nigeria and felt like she was at home. After freeing ourselves from her crazy stories, we went back to the TV station to feed the footage. This time they were ready and it went fine. Next time I need to send footage via satellite, I will make sure to go somewhere that has done it before.
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