Adventure in Belize with Matt Lauer by John Avey
Sometimes it starts with just the faintest of sparks.
My boss called me into his office in early November and asked this simple question, "How would you like to go to Belize on the 10th?" Ah, gee, I don't know, let me check my schedule.
Most people take longer to decide what socks they are going to wear today. I said yes about the time it took you to blink just now.
You have to understand, this is not the first time a question like that has been asked of me. In fact, I got into this business just so I would have that question posed to me as often as possible. I have had to answer the question, "How would you like to go to Costa Rica?", "the USSR?", "India?", "London?", "Bermuda?", "Mexico?" Yes, yes, yes. Wouldn't you? If you are still in doubt, it's always business class seats and top-notch hotels.
They also sometimes ask, "Can you go to the hurricane?" The tornado? The airplane crash? The school shooting? The racially motivated dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Tx... Yup, on my way. Hundreds of times.
So, Belize is an easy one. Middle of the ocean, a tiny atoll, no phones or TV. Hell, yes!
A couple of small problems you might want to be aware of, they tell me. You have to share a room (against Union rules but OK with me), it involves a boat ride across the open ocean, there are bugs (nasty bugs, I believe they said), food may be MRE's (also know as "C-rations") and your edit "room" might be under a palm tree on the beach. OK, that last one is a problem because oil and water actually get along pretty well compared to electronics and salt water. In fact the engineers have always told me, "If your stuff gets drenched with salt water, dunk it in a swimming pool. We can fix THAT!"
Plus, I am an EDITOR, the divas of news. We do our thing inside, man. Warm, dry, well provisioned, 110 volts AC. All the perks.
The camera guys, field producers, RF engineers and even the corespondent (Matt Lauer and Kerry Sanders, in the case of Belize) all have to be outside 'cause that where it's happening. So, I said so and won my first battle. The editor will get an edit room. Not for me, of course. For the gear!
The 10th arrives, I fly to Belize City with my 11 cases of edit gear ($900 dollars luggage charge, each way!), the next morning I load it all up in a small boat and head out to Northern Cay (key) 50 miles across the ocean. The producers have decided do a live shot from The Blue Hole, a 400 foot deep hole inside Lighthouse Reef created eons ago and discovered by Jacques Cousteau back in the 70's.
The purpose of this trip? Depends on your point of view. We (NBC News) want ratings. The Today Show has been #1 in it's slot for 11 years (really!!) and we will never give up, never surrender!!! Take your best shot ABC News, Good Morning America!
Another reason, viewers seem to love it when we try the impossible. Matt does "Where in the World is Matt Lauer," a successful series on the show and this one is called "The Ends of the Earth." "Oh Ned, come here and look at the pretty pictures on the TV!"
Another reason, 'cause we can. Looking around at the people who are with me on this trip I realize that we have about 250 years of combined experience at doing this -- getting a TV signal out of ANYWHERE! The South Pole, the middle of a glacier in Iceland, Mt. Kilimanjaro and here on Northern Cay. We not only get the signal out but we can use the satellite dish to get a dial tone, a internet connection and eventually, watch the Jets play. In living color!!
The technical challenges are this: There are several cameras and microphones on a bobbing boat and the pictures and sound must make it back to New York AND the audio from the show must make it back to us on the boat so we can hear what going on. Know when it's our turn to talk and such. Even if Matt is reporting from underwater. If you have set up a dish on your house for Directtv, you know it's pretty exacting to find the signal from 22,000 miles in space from your rock-solid roof. Bobbing boat? Fugetaboutdit.
So, the pictures and sound are sent via fiber optic cable to another boat parked 50 feet away and that boat sends the signal via microwave to a place called Long Cay, 8 miles across the water. The techs built a 30 foot scaffold platform on a rickety dock on Long Cay and used a laser pointer make sure the microwave dishes could "see" each other! Clever.
Your dry and well provisioned EDITOR is on Northern Cay and he NEEDS his own satellite thingy so when he feels like posting photos on his Facebook page or calling his wife or reading Nick's blog or actually sending my edited pieces to NY, he can do so.
To accomplish this, the network shipped from NYC about 200 cases of equipment to Lighthouse Reef. And the scaffold makings. Hundreds of bottles of water and all the food we could eat and almost enough beer and wine. (I brought my own martini makings). We had so much RF (jargon for "radio-frequency") bouncing around that the Belize military did a fly over with one of their helicopter gun ships one day to check out what was going on.
Finally, to wrap this up, a question my mom was fond of asking me, "What is it you do, again?"
In addition to the live segments, photographers, producers and corespondents shoot taped pieces in the field. They bring the tape to me, I ingest it into my AVID computer edit system, they write and narrate a script and I cut the pictures and sound into a (hopefully) understandable and brilliantly interesting story. Beginning, middle and end sort of thing. The Today Show budgets about $30,000 for each segment on the show -- that is between 3 and 5 minutes of airtime. The budget for something like Belize is, who knows?
As a post script, I did get scabies. Google it.
Better yet, follow the link below to my Facebook photos page and do a slideshow of the trip. Most photos are captioned -- don't miss that. (You don't have to join to see the photos). Check out my bites.
And to my NBC boss, next time the answer is...YES!!!
John Avey
Studio City, Ca
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=9731&l=ae66c&id=1259178952