It has been such a long time since I posted! Work has been crazy, crazy, crazy. I go in early, I get home around 8, I work some more at home. Plus last week I went on three trips. Over the first weekend I went to Minneapolis to hang out with dermatologists. Then I went to Seattle to interview a rheumatologist. Then I went to Atlanta to visit my friend from forever ago, whom I will call Hard-Core.
This week I didn't have to go anywhere except Skokie, to interview a dermatologist. His wife is a gastroenterologist, so he identified with my office debate about whose job is grosser. His wife always wins.
I won't tell about all of them right now. But I will tell about Seattle.
In addition to the rheumatologist, we had to interview a woman who had a horrible rheumatic disease. Her job was to talk about how awful her disease was, followed by how my client's drug had changed her life. That's the actual quote we look for: "ZEROVAX changed my life." That holds true regardless of what drug we're talking about -- unless it's an antibiotic or a cancer drug, in which case what we really want is, "VAROZEX saved my life." I don't know why drug names have to be in all caps, but they do.
The place we interviewed her, Washington Park Arboretum, is like something out of a movie -- lush and green and full of exotic trees, with lots of water and birds. And Seattle in August couldn't be nicer.
Our heroine, A, gave us one shot where she had to walk up from the pond wearing a heavy backpack. As she walked up the bank, I noticed that the ducks swimming around looked . . . disappointed. They kind of followed her, and when they got to dry land they retreated and swarmed about irritably.
Later, when we were waiting for the camera guys to set up, we all sat on the grass. Bad move. Next thing we knew, the ducks had stormed the beach and invaded the lawn. They circled us, pecking at bags and equipment and generally looking pissed off that we had dared to show up without food.
Nor did our video interview slow them down. The shot was close-up, so you couldn't see them milling around A's feet, but they were there, milling around A's feet and the tripod and everywhere, for 45 straight minutes. Every so often, during some poignant part of A's story, you'd hear them loudly insisting that we throw down the grub. The sound guy had to stop us a couple of times and say, "Y'know, we got a 'quack' in there," and we'd debate whether it could pass for ordinary ambient noise, like you would get in any outdoor shot, or if we needed to redo that part of the interview.
Since I wasn't actually doing the shoot, just overseeing it, and since I wasn't the client, my job was to scare the hell out of the ducks. But they were unflappable (heh heh), and some kayakers advised me not to scare them too bad or I'd risk a fine.
Needless to say I'm looking forward to reading the transcript.
Oh, and then we went to the doctor's office and found that in the previous hour and a half, he had developed a hopeless case of laryngitis. He obviously felt really bad about it, and no amount of sound adjustments or lozenges helped. So the video producer is going out there again today to re-shoot.
Luckily my client didn't insist on my being there a second time, because this weekend Little Guest is coming to visit! I bought some fine-looking hot-smoked Copper River Salmon when I was out West, so he's in for a treat.
