The NRA Annual Meeting ended Sunday evening, and I spent all day yesterday filming video for EMS1.com, the first of what I hope will be an entire series of skills videos reconciling NREMT exam scenarios and the skills as they're actually performed on the street.

The star of the video, unfortunately with a face made for radio.

In the course of filming, several things became obvious:

• The soldier that came up with the term "hurry up and wait" never worked with a professional cinematographer, or he'd have thanked his lucky stars for the organization and efficiency of the military. Still, Ray Kemp has a master's eye for detail, and in the end all the painstaking preparation will pay off in a quality educational video.
• This stuff is hard. I'm used to standing in front of large groups of people and talking, and I think I'm pretty good at being engaging and informative, but something about staring at that camera's unblinking eye renders me a stuttering, stammering, doofus. But, I eventually hit all my marks, delivered my dialogue without getting my tang toungled, and Ray still had some hair left by the time we finished. It helped to think of my multiple takes as payback for the length of time it took to set up.
• There's a lot more to shooting a video that just setting up your camera on a tripod, standing in front of it, and blathering on until you run out of stuff to say. There's lighting to contend with, properly blocking the shots, color balance, setting up A and B cameras, syncing audio between the two, setting up and positioning dollies and reflectors and myriad other doodads whose functions I barely understand. Still, we finished principal shooting in only two days, shot plenty of stuff for the B roll, and all that's left is for me to review the storyboards and dialogue for accuracy, and filming the action shots.*
• Christian Hospital Northeast EMS has a quality operation, and Chris Cebollero and his crews deserve kudos.
   

When I get home, I'll post a wrapup and some product reviews from the NRA Annual Meeting, so y'all stay tuned…

*Storyboards… principal shooting… B roll… hit my marks… blocking… y'all note the savvy use of industry jargon here. Before long, I'll be giving air kisses and telling folks to have their people call my people.