Ok moving on. So I haven't talked about my job to ya'll as much as I would like to. From the second I stepped into KSL back in my senior year of high school I knew this is what I wanted to do. I love the adrenaline of breaking news, I love the kind of people that work in a news station. It is basically the best. It is also long and tiring and HOT! Not the best. But when you combine them you get magic!
So I work for ABC News 4. Officially it is WCIV. I have a great group of people to work with. Today though, I had a realization. I realized that after a few weeks of hard work I made it. I think I've been initiated as part of the team. Not as 'the new girl' or the young kid who doesn't know anything yet, but the girl who can do this job. Let me explain.
Yesterday was an extremely long day. To start I woke up at 5am to get to a shoot at 7. The shoot went ok but I didn't get everything I needed and it got frustrating. But oh well. I didn't have time to worry about it. So I went to church and then back to work. At 11 I went out to shoot a nat pack and came back just in time to edit and make it to my next event, a Beer and Dogs event. After that I headed 20 minutes out to a finale for a festival. I got just enough video before heading back to the station to edit everything. But I did it. And I even had some time to spare. To fill that time I volunteered to go to a River Dogs baseball game to shoot some highlight video. It was after that that things got really interesting.
After shooting River Dogs it was about 7:30 and I was just about ready to call it a night when . . . Breaking news, 911 call requesting water rescue. We got an address and I was out of there. It was on John's Island, 30 minutes out. I got to the scene just as police were arriving. I immediately started shooting video. I had only gotten about 13 shots when the family approached me and threw me off the property. I didn't blame them, I actually had no idea I was on private property but respected their wishes and immediately left. There was no reason to stay except to gather information. I got a few details and headed back. (PS that footage I got was the only footage gathered from any of the stations).
At about 9:30 I was once again finishing up and ready to head out when there was another 911 call. This one was a fire out in Mt. Pleasant. I headed out again and shot some video and grabbed a very quick interview. It was about 10:15 before I left and I needed to get my video ingested and edited before the news at 11. I got back to the station at 10:40 and quickly threw something together. With a deep breath I looked at the time (11:00) and decided my day could officially be over.
So. The next morning I walked into the station, still a tad tired from my busy day. The first person to approach me was Scott. He is one of my bosses. He told me I 'had achieved rockstar status'. It was nice to achieve a little recognition for all the work I had done the night before. Many people including the news director told me how much they appreciated all my work. I even got a round of applause from the news team. It felt really good! But this was not the end to the craziness.
My reporter, Stacy was working on a story about an accident that occurred over the weekend. Some firefighters and EMT workers were on scene of an accident when a drunk driver hit them head on. it happened at 2am so we didn't have any footage but we were going to do a general story about worker safety. We had an interview at 2:00pm and our story was going to be on the 7:00 news with a shorter story airing in the 6. We had our work cut out for us. While we were with the EMT workers we got an e-mail with the names and addresses of all the victims. This made the time crunch worse because we were going to have to knock some doors to try to get an interview. Except the EMT workers who were with us knew the EMT worker who was hit and gave us his number. We called him and he was willing to talk to us. We got a great interview. So we arrived back at the station about 3:45. Stacy quickly logged the video and I began editing.
About 5 I was all done with the VO/Sot and just waiting for the script for the package. We were feeling prepared. But then we got copies of the dashcam footage from the scene. It was really graphic, as in seeing people get hit head on by a car graphic. We couldn't show some of it but there was a lot we could show. This was the most recent stuff we had and wanted to lead with it. So with an hour before air we had to get the footage from the disk to the drive, edit it and put together a new VO/Sot. With minutes to air I was exporting. But we did it. This left an hour to edit an entire package. I was stressing with a smile on my face. Somehow with help from outside this world we got it done. It turned out good too. Take a look if you like. I really like how it turned out. Especially considering the time crunch.
WCIV-TV | ABC News 4 - Charleston News, Sports, Weather
As stressful as it was it was the best too! That is what this job is all about! Deadline and killing it! I'm having way too much fun. I feel like I became part of the team after all this. They like me, they know what I have to bring to the table! It's a blast!
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