I spent the first two days getting acquainted with the state of regional youth work and produced a story in which I said pretty much nothing. Well, nothing except that there are huge differences between different cities. So far, so good.
Wednesday was spent preparing a story of the state of regional football. When I write ’preparing’ I mean that I slacked off to home early in the afternoon because I went to see a game in the evening. I videoed the entire first half and interviewed a few audience members. Sifting through the footage took most of Thursday even though the story itself was really simple. Not much content there, though.
And then onto Friday. I arrived at work promptly at nine o’clock sharp and had just gotten my jacket off when boss told me to not bother undressing but rather grab a camera man and get going already. To make a short story even shorter, he’d thought the appointment was at 13.00, not 9.00. So in we went to Central Finland Health Care District.
The idea was to do a report on surgery queues. I had absolutely no time to prepare and to make things perfect I got some three hundred pages of fiscal reports and whatnots. We started worrying about footage on the way to the hospital, as it’s a real pain in the butt to shoot there one has to get a permission from the hospital and each and every patient that is going to be recognizable which basically means that you can’t shoot shit. Suffice to say that at quarter past nine my spirits weren’t very high.
I was still feeling in the dumps when we headed back to headquarters four hours later. The people from Yle 24 called and asked to do an extra interview and grab some general footage for them too. I’d gotten long-winded answers from my interviewee, had minimal footage, wasn’t quite sure what to put in the story and was famished. A couple of hours later I’d finished the script and noticed that I’d left out the few things we would’ve had pictures on. But then the magic of journalism happened.
When we started rummaging through the digitized footage on our Avid workstation, things suddenly started to make sense. When I talked of queues, we could use the shots from the parking space. When I talked of cutting down on the amount of days spent in aftercare, we could apply archive footage of empty hospital beds. When the interviewee talked about how much money they’d used to cut down the waiting times, we could punch in close-ups of the fiscal report and shots of people reading it. And best of all, the story seemed to make some sense. Perhaps not the biggest news event of the year, but a coherent piece anyway.
I got home after eight and a half hours. I wasn’t drowsy but rather awake. It felt good to have tackled such a difficult situation and to come out on the top. In word it made me feel like a proper reporter again.
Comments are closed.