Dance therapy

This week I covered dance therapy at Children’s Hospital. You can check out my story here.

I have to say, I was a bit skeptical when the producers assigned me the story in the morning. It wasn’t exactly hard news. But when I got to the hospital and saw the kids, it was pretty touching.

I’ve got to give a big shoutout to Kevin Corrasco – the boy I interviewed who has cancer. Kevin was one of the most articulate 13-year-olds I’ve met. He’s also a drummer (like me), and you can check out some of his drum videos on his Youtube channel.

This was a tricky piece to edit b-roll wise. I got to the hospital twenty minutes late so when I arrived the group was on their last song. I was so nervous I wasn’t going to have enough b-roll that I kept my camera rolling the entire time – no cuts in between to set up shots. When I got back to the newsroom, I had to use pretty much every shot I had, but it worked out in the end.

If you watch this piece closely, you’ll notice there isn’t much ambient sound in the beginning. The children are moving those pom-poms to music, but you can’t really hear it. That was a bit of a mistake on my part.

I noticed right away that the boombox they were using was too soft and too far in the corner to be picked up by my camera’s audio. And I got too distracted in the course of my reporting to do what I should have done: put the mic right next to the boombox and then edit it all together later.

But hey, I’m happy with the way it came out in the end. Only one more reporting round for me this semester. It’s been fun.

-DS