News Videos

The journalists at USNI News are writers first but sometimes you just need to see objects and people in motion to understand what the hell is going on. Over the last ten years, my team and I have refined how to video troops, ships and aircraft in complicated scenarios and blend the results with our print stories. 

Evacuation exercise

On a softball field in rural North Carolina, I got a taste of what it would be like to flee a country at short notice. I climbed on to a MV-22 Osprey and flew to the amphibious warship USS Bataan sailing off the coast. The Marines assigned to the ship were simulating an non-combatant evacuation by turning an office building into an embattled U.S. embassy. The exercise was less about combat and more about paperwork, as Marines trained in logistics of people-processing sorted out how to get people from shore to the ship safely. One highlight was the ride back to shore on the Marine UH-1Y Huey with the doors open. In addition to shooting and editing this video, I wrote a longer feature piece for USNI News.

Aboard USS Gerald R. Ford

I may have been on aircraft carrier  USS Gerald R. Ford more than any other warship. The first time was when the ship was literally in pieces in a dry dock in Newport News Shipbuilding in 2010. The world’s largest (and most expensive) warship is to some the best expression of naval shipbuilding and technical achievement while others consider Ford emblematic of a broken defense acquisition system. On this trip in 2023, I embarked on Ford at the start of a complex set of tests to prove the aircraft carrier was ready to serve as an active warship six years after it entered the fleet.

Underway with the Royal Navy

In late 2018, I got a last minute invite to spend the day aboard the U.K. Royal Navy’s first aircraft carrier in a generation – HMS Queen Elizabeth. I was still learning best practices for shooting underway in terms of gear and techniques and compared to the BBC video crew, I probably looked pretty cheesy with my wife’s Canon 5D (which I didn’t really know how to use) and dragging a too long XLR cable attached to a Sm-58 vocal mike and an ancient TASCAM to prevent losing from the ship’s electronic systems (pro audio and electronic warfare don’t mix). We have a saying at our newsroom we borrowed from some reporters at my first paper, sometimes you need to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. What I came back with was a combination of semi usable footage from the Canon  and some lucky iPhone video (note the shot of the carrier from the open door of the AW101 Merlin) and very (very) clean audio from our shipboard interviews and was able to turn this into something I was pretty proud of at the time (if I had to do it again I would have included an audio bed for the silent footage at the start).

Amphib Cop Show

When we were producing the first videos for USNI News and developing our house style, we started each video with a 20 to 30 second music montage to set the tone for the following interview. I went overboard on this intro, writing and recording an ersatz 70s cop show theme (with lots of clavinet) and cutting Pentagon B-roll to fit the theme. I like the result, but writing an original score to every video proved unmanageable in the long term.