Airplane!

A little while back I was finally able to complete my first multimedia work for The Record.  The photographers here contribute to an ongoing online series about extraordinary people in the Waterloo Region community called “One of Us“.  One day on assignment at the Waterloo airport I stumbled across a new pilot, Greg Roosenboom.  After sharing the idea of a multimedia story with Greg, and pitching it to my editor, I was lucky enough to start on the story of his drive to become a pilot, and join him on a flight to Niagara Falls to do it!  This was my first time in a Cessna aircraft, and I was focused on what I was shooting, but it was obviously a fantastic experience being up in the plane and seeing the Falls from up above.

This was also an interesting assignment because it was in coordination with a writer.  A writing intern, Chelsea Miya, was interested in writing a feature on the subject after we discussed the story.  We approached our editors and coordinated the date of the release of my video with the printing of her story in the paper’s Saturday feature Etcetera.  There was a rather large hiccup in the process when my video DSLR required a repair, but Chelsea’s story was held to coincide with the video, and it ended up being a cool collaboration.  The story is very good, and is online HERE.  I just found out the story and photos were sent out on the wire for what they call a “feature swap.”  Here’s how it looked in The Record.

With my wide angle lens I was able to get a lot of footage inside the plane, and then some more on the apron (that’s pilot jargon for…airplane driveway).  Shooting so much video had my brain stuck within the realm of moving images.  So even though I had made the decision to only use moving images, I still had that collision of video/stills to tackle for the printed feature.  The next week after the flight I interviewed Greg at the Flight Centre – two days later the video had to be online!  Such is life in the news industry, so I was “blocked-off” for a shift and able to get the edit done.  You can see it on the One of Us blog or below in HD on my Vimeo page.

A HEAD IN THE CLOUDS from Melissa Tait on Vimeo