In June, 2016, National Geographic had the opportunity to interview President Barack Obama when he made a trip to Yosemite National Park. The show “Explorer”, and host Richard Bacon, would conduct the interview. National Geographic had an exclusive. The show considering holding the entire interview for when the show would air, which would be at least a month later. But the digital side of the organization knew it was better to get a bit of our exclusive out there ASAP before anyone else published anything about the Yosemite trip.

So producer Kathryn Carlson and I joined the Explorer crew to do the quick-turn.

I walked with the interview crew, while Kathryn joined the crew following Michelle. Due to security restrictions, we wouldn’t be able to leave the area for a while after the interview, so I brought my editing laptop with me all the way along the interview route. As soon as the interview wrapped, I collected the cards from the three cameramen and audio and sat on a rock to synch the angles and edit. 

I also did a quick export of the full interview audio to send to our print reporter who would write the story from a different location. 

We chose a clip to feature, did some quick color correction as everything was shot in C-log, added lower 3rds, and within an hour had our export ready to upload. Once we were released from security and got to a wifi area, the clip was uploaded and published to the website, YouTube and social. 

Watch on the National Geographic website

We’d also agreed to do a quick text-on-screen specifically for Facebook that would need to be up by the next morning. (The interview location was a good five hour round-trip drive from the hotel as well.) It would need to incorporate two more camera angles from other parts of the Obama’s visit. The video would be short, but there was an entire TV show’s worth of assets to organize and synch before we could even cut anything. But we published by morning on the east coast. 

The crew! I’m the woman.

 

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A post shared by James Peterson (@petersoncine) on Jun 20, 2016 at 2:22pm PDT