ABC News and Current Affairs ran a set of stories on their front page titled "Summer Heatwave", and I was so proud to see a locally-produced ABC Open story there alongside the other news coverage.
So proud I captured screen shots to send to the story's producer Jaime Kelly to show how it appeared for PC users and how it appeared for users of mobile devices.
Jaime Kelly, a communications student from the University of Newcastle, chose to tell the story of her sister Danielle Kelly for the ABC Open Day In The Life project.
As she writes in the description of her story at the project page: "This documentary follows a day in the life of Danielle Kelly, a passionate volunteer fire fighter at the Peninsula Rural Fire Brigade in Mirrabooka".
"Danielle is the epitome of dedication and passion for a bigger cause.
"Although Danielle is not a full-time fire fighter, she spends all her spare time at the station, and is known to skip a lecture or two at the University of Newcastle, where she studies bio-medical science, to man the station and await the thrill-seeking adventure of attending a fire call."
Comments to the story were overwhelmingly positive.
Before the Christmas break and January's bushfire emergency ABC Open Hunter spoke to Jaime by phone about the story, the challenges in producing it, and what the team discovered during the process.
"A few of the days that we went up there, it was a bit hard to get the shots that we wanted to," Jaime explained.
"After our first filming day we came back, and had a look at the footage that we had, and realised that we didn't have enough to make the story that we wanted."
With interview footage overrun with background noise the team, including Emily Steele (interviewer) and Sasha Zajac (camera operator), returned a week later to get more footage.
"Even then we still couldn't get a really good recording of her interview, because of all of the radios on at the station, so it was a little bit hard, but we got there," said Jaime.
On the second day the team shot some footage of Jaime looking longingly through the fence at the station at a bushfire off in the distance.
"We were actually packing up to go, and then they were listening to the radio and were like 'ooh something's happening', and then we looked at the horizon, and there was all of that smoke," Jaime said, "and they all just jumped on the truck and headed off."
"And it was a shame that Danielle couldn't go, because we had the (wearable video camera) ready for her to take out, but it ended up that we got some good shots from the station with the fire in front of her and everything, so it was good."
The team also struck some luck with the availability of some archival footage.
"We had just been talking about some of the (call-outs) that she's been on, and the guys were just like 'well we've got footage from the truck, did you want to have a look at that', and we were just like 'yeah that would be awesome!'"
The team struck a bit of a technical bottleneck in the post-production (editing) stage, and had some challenging conditions for recording audio.
But in the end it turned out well, and it was nice to be able to get the volunteers side of the story out on the front page of ABC News and Current Affairs during a major bushfire emergency, so well done to the team!
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