Kyiv, 20th – 27th May 2014
News coverage requires a good filling energy rich healthy breakfast to start one’s day. Black tea and raw undressed cabbage didn’t quite cut it. Even with seconds I was a little concerned as more often than not on overseas trips I have been lucky if I get two meals a day.
This trip to the Ukraine had me working with our Moscow correspondent and a local coordinator and translator. I had only worked directly with one of these three before, the producer, who was excellent.
Wednesday. Our first job was to put together a couple of pre-election pieces showing the build up to the elections and gauging how people might vote and what they hoped for the outcome and the country. On the Wednesday this involved filming a family at home and asking the wife, whilst she was cooking traditional cheese filled pancakes, about daily life, the gas supply and price issue. We then filmed the whole family having their breakfast and whilst doing so my reporter, through the translator, asked some questions, which drew some emotional responses, especially from the wife. It was a case of capturing the mood without understanding the content. Next I rode with the father as he visited a petrol station to fill up his car. This scene served two purposes, one being that we wanted to show the price increases and petrol stations were not keen to allow filming if approached directly, and secondly we could ask him on camera, whilst he drove past many candidate posters, about the elections. Using the smallish NXCAM to film I had an embarrassing and unfortunate incident of turning the iris ring too far, and closing it, as we drove into the petrol station, meaning I had to ask the father to drive through and approach again. We took our chances andI filmed him filling up without asking the station staff in advance and as expected they came out and expressed their dissatisfaction with this and making calls to head quarters. Rather cheekily by the time it was confirmed that we couldn’t film I already had all the shots I needed, which anyway didn’t include any company names or logos.
Next stop was a fruit and veg market, then a supermarket, all to show where prices may have increased and ask shoppers about daily life issues and the elections. Finally we had quite a drive around to find presidential candidate posters in good locations. There were plenty of posters around, but not too surprisingly so many of them in Kyiv were for the Mayoral Elections. As for good locations I ideally wanted to show them with people around to give an image to a possible narrative of candidates appealing to the people.
It’s not going to be easy, but if we work together…
Thursday. The OSCE were deploying election monitors for these elections and they were all due to congregate and be briefed at a venue in Kyiv before being dispersed around the country. We managed to film and interview them all gathering, even some Japanese members, before being allowed to film just a little of their briefing, just no close ups of the speakers. We had managed to get 5 minutes to speak with the head of the monitors as well, which I felt we wasted a bit by asking about things we could easy put in the script whereas want we couldn’t would be comments about any concerns, problems and issues they might encounter. We later filmed a press conference by the OSCE and another by the Ukrainian Electoral commission. The day’s filming ended with us looking for people we could interview who had fled from the East of the country and were being housed temporarily in guest quarters of ex-President Yankovich’s residence! It was slim pickings because most of them were out looking for work and the few around didn’t want to be interviewed. We did finally find a couple from Kromatosk, who had been ‘forced’ to flee.
Temporary dwellings for some Eastern Ukrainians
Friday. It was all about Election day preparations today. We got to film at a ballot distribution centre, that is where all the polling station reps come to collect the ballot papers that will be used in their polling station. They get picked up, signed for, loaded into vehicles under police watch and driven off.
From here we went to film a small polling station receiving the ballots, counting and stamping them and putting them in a locked safe, where they would stay, under armed guard, until the polls opened on Sunday morning.
A Presidential ballot paper.
Saturday. It had to happen, the inevitable filming of Maidan Square, which my correspondent still hadn’t seen. We now had to go and get some genral shots of it and street interviews. Our timing of 8am on a Saturday morning wasn’t great as it very, very quiet. Too bad for us, we had a news deadline of 9am. Immediately after this we were off to try and get some footage of the stand-in president and current prime minister praying at the UNESCO church. It was a beautiful setting ruined by all us camera crews vying for a position where we could see the acting president’s face from some distance and off the shoulder. I felt sorry for the church’s ministers who had spent time telling us all not to step on the red carpets inside.
We then went to confirm and check out various locations we anticipated to be filming at on Sunday, Election day.
Sunday. This was always going to be a long day, and so it was. We were out of the hotel at 6am and not back in again until 4am the next morning. No matter, this was why we were here. First off was joining the scrum and grabbing a spot at the polling station we knew Prooshenko would be using to cast his vote. We were among the first few there and got what at the time was a front row spot but 4 hours later by the time Poroshenko made his appearance you’d have wondered why we seemed to be at the back! This can happen and in this case was down to a combination of security continually pushing us all back and then photographers and smaller camera users jumping in and filling the space. It’s frustrating but often arriving early will get you a spot but arriving late enough that no one can object gets you closer! Anyway on my set of steps and with a very kind Russian journalist holding a collection of mics near the front I managed to get the pictures and sound I wanted.
Polling station about to open.
Votes starting to come in.
The moment you can’t change your mind.
With the polls open and voting well under way we had no time to hang about as we had a live report to get to. My correspondent had gone on ahead to finish his script and get it approved by HQ. I arrived on the 8th floor of the Ukraine Hotel with 15 minutes to go. First things first, say hello and introduce myself to the crew, then explain politely if I could operate the camera for the live, as I speak Japanese, but that I’d appreciate the resident camera operators help with the set up. Our ‘window’ had begun, I had Tokyo calling me for coordination, mic tests, IFB checks, back-up telepic set ups and picture confirmation. All good except that we had no picture. We were apparently transmitting fine from Kyiv, Madrid was seeing us fine and uplinking us but Tokyo was getting black with intermittent ‘something or other’. I was trying to deal with a slightly panicking Japanese reporter, a bewildered Ukrainian producer and the Spanish technicians, who also had Madrid and Tokyo on their phones. Suggestions about correct camera settings and downlink parameters were flying around and everybody was claiming it was fine at their point of responsibility. We were now into the one minute to go countdown. The telepic earpiece was inserted into the relevant orifice as we now expected the live to become a live telephone report only. With 30 seconds to go and still nothing I took a quick look around to make sure no one was stepping on a cable (*you need to see another of my posts to explain this) but only saw one technician fiddling with the encoder. At 15 seconds to go Tokyo were shouting in my ear that they had picture and that we should be ready. The magic of beaming live television pictures across the world went ahead. I had loads of phone calls from Tokyo afterwards wanting to know what had happened and gone on. It turned out that the satellite links were fine, the camera settings were fine and that the problem was the settings within the encoder, which had been set to progressive instead of interlace. Perhaps.
Again, no time to hang about, we had to get back out to the family we’d filmed on the first day, and who were now waiting for us to go and vote. It was about a 20 minute walk from their flat to the polling station in a nearby school.The weather was good and so I was able to get some somewhat positive images of them as a family making their way to ‘have their say’ in the country’s future. The polling station was very busy and whilst the parents queued to register we did our best to keep their children amused. This wasn’t too hard as I just flipped my camera’s screen around and let them see themselves on it. I also took advantage of this time to film some more general and alternative shots of people voting. It’s amazing what a cameraman will find to film and create images with when killing time.
Shortly after this grilling my young subject burst into tears!
The family voted, we interviewed them and then it began to rain, really pour down, hail, thunder, lightning, as if the sky had decided to empty itself all at once. We had to get the family home and find time to allow our local staff to go and vote themselves. After all it wouldn’t be right to come here to report on the importance of the elections and then not make time for two voters to exercise that right.
The frontrunner was Poroshenko the “Chocolate King” and he was expected to give a victory speech, based on the exit polls, from his campaign press centre shortly after 8pm. We went to grab a spot at this venue but this time although still early we were relatively late amongst the media and there really was no tripod or step position available. We ended up taking a couple of seats in the audience and it was from there I filmed a piece to camera as the smiling victor walked onto the stage, accompanied by the Kyiv’s new mayor, the enormous ex-boxer Vitali Klitschko. It worked. I was then asked to do a funny thing and that was to film both of their speeches in full. The reason given was that even though they’d record the feed in Japan they wouldn’t pay for a translator in Tokyo and so the audio still had to be cut at our end and then sent for matching up before broadcast. The Moscow correspondent complained that he always had to do this. When I eventually saw the on air broadcast they’d ended up using my handheld NXCAM shots from the audience anyway!
“Chocolate Box”
The victors.
We had another live broadcast, no real problems this time and then I had the remaining footage to send whilst my reporter wrote and re-wrote his script for the morning news report in Japan. It was 4am when I got my head onto a pillow but not for long as the alarm was set for 7am to start again with result reaction interviews, more lives and an OSCE summing up press conference…
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