It was a dark and stormy night....... When I was a teenager I used to watch a lot of historical documentaries and daily news. All these important people making big decisions or soldiers and police running around in a dangerous area. Then I realized there was another group of people there and they were the journalists and specifically the cameramen. When a person sets foot on mountain top...there is a camera there. When a person studies a remote jungle community...there is a camera there. When a earthquake levels a city....a cameraman is there.
I already had a older brother working at our local TV station in Kitchener, Canada and he seemed to be enjoying his career immensely but by the time I was ready to leave school and go into college or university I was more interested in architecture and design then television news.
A look at my school grades made university a distant dream but at least a three year college program was within my reach. I was accepted for both a architectural design course and a broadcast course. I chose the broadcast program because at that time (1983) there was a recession in North America and architectural designers were not very well paid. TV didn't pay much either but at least the program was in my hometown college and I wouldn't have to move to the other city for the design course.
After learning much about radio and TV broadcasting operations (not too much on the journalism side) in my first of 3 years I was able to bag a part-time job in our local TV station as a weekend/weeknight videotape editor for the news department. It didn't hurt that my brother was a director and is well respected by all who still work with him. My boss gave me two weeks of training with some of the senior guys and then after that it was sink or swim time. If I screwed up a few times I was out. If I did well then I could get more hours and eventually move into shooting. My supervisor, Pat Fitzgerald, was also well respected by all who worked under him and he wouldn't let us pick up a camera until he knew we were good editors. If, as an editor you know what shot you would like to see next in a story then there was a good chance that you would 'shoot for editing' when you were in the field.
After about a year of part-time editing I was allowed to shoot on a long holiday weekend. We had old Hitachi FP31 tube cameras, 3/4" record decks and all the usual accessories. If you had to hump all the gear into a hotel, house or nighttime stakeout at the courts it would add up to about 40 kg. In winter time add a heavy coat, driving wind and extra batteries. I must have done something right because I then became the part-timer of choice when it came to shooting....or my boss was tired of me pestering him all the time!
I dropped out of college after my second year due to poor marks in one subject, a six week teachers strike that frustrated us all, a main teacher who's current knowledge of the industry was limited, and I was told by my boss that if I didn't go back I could expect even more full-time hours at the TV station. So, I didn't get my diploma but I did get much more experience in a respected newsroom as well as shooting/editing commercials, local programs, remotes (OB's), etc. After another year or two I was fulltime and continued to land many of the good assignments that help to keep the day to day job exciting.
One of those assignments was to follow a Canadian missionary in Burundi and Zaire (now D.R. Congo) help Rwanda refugees who had left Rwanda after they committed the Genocide in '94. We transited Nairobi and spent about eight days with him as he oversaw the operations along the Rwanda border. When I returned to Canada I knew that I would no longer enjoy local news as much. When you travel halfway around the world to cover a piece of history it makes the local city council story or house fire seem very mundane. I soon started to look around for a more exciting location. Moving down the highway to Toronto to cover 'big city' news like.....city council and house fires didn't appeal too me too much since that meant paying more for housing. I applied for one job as a production cameraman at a San Francisco/ San Jose station but came in second to a local guy.
About five months after the Africa trip I was cleaning out all those little scraps of paper that seem to accumulate in one's wallet when I came across some names and numbers of TV people in Nairobi who I could have contacted had I needed assistance while there. One was the manager of a local video production company...perhaps he could put me in contact with someone who needed a shooter/editor.
After all, I figured I could take a few months leave of absence and work over there for a while then travel. Maybe that would be enough to recharge my batteries and figure out where to go next. I thought I would need to make twenty calls over twenty days to find someone in Africa that was hiring. So, I called this guy in Nairobi, explained who I was and what I was interested in and he says "Great! We're looking for someone." So, I fax my resume and call back a few days later. "When can you start...we've got a German producer that wants to do a piece on the Ebola virus in six weeks?". Five weeks later I was there, eight weeks after that I officially quit my Canadian job, and now seven years later I'm married and shoot and edit for CNN all over Africa and occasionally the Mid-East and have never regretted taking such a big jump into the unknown.
To this day I'm still interested in current events and different cultures but not in newsroom office politics and management ladder climbing. That is what keeps my day to day job very exciting.....what will we encounter in this new location. If I wasn't interested in these things then news shooting is not the place for me. It's similar to people who grew up with an interest in animals and go on to become vets. If it's something you have an interest in then perhaps it's also a possible career.
