Picture the scene…

 

It’s March 2014 and I’m at TV Connect with a colleague. We want to gather some video content for one of our online communities so we’re attending with the intention of interviewing, on camera, some of the exhibitors at the show. All is going well and we have a couple of interviews under our belt, however, my colleague is suddenly taken ill and has to return home… So… I’m left alone and with a video camera….  

As my colleague was taking care of the AV side of our partnership (with me as the interviewer) it makes things a bit tricky as I now have to work the AV technology AND conduct the interviews too! I ask her to take the camera tripod back to the office with her as I’ll ‘hand-hold’ the camera instead. I simply don’t have enough hands to carry around the camera, audio equipment and my own bags as well as an extendable 4ft tripod!

 

So I take another walk around the exhibition stands looking for more victims  candidates and wondering why there are so few other women here (at least the queue for the ladies bathroom will be short!) Perhaps Broadcasting is simply not an industry that many female engineers get into?

 

After a while I come across a brightly coloured orange stand with a couple of suitably suited gentlemen eating sandwiches and taking a lunch break. Mmmm.. I’m hungry too but I’ll just do this last one before I break for lunch. I start with my now well-rehearsed script:

 

“Hi, I’m Lisa. I’m from the Institution of Engineering and Technology and I’m here gathering video content for our Multimedia Communications Network.  I was wondering if someone from your company would be available and willing to be on camera just talking about who you are and what you’re doing at TV Connect?”

 

The two gentlemen discuss a potential interviewee between themselves and then turn to me and reply “Sure” they say “Give us 5 minutes and we’ll find someone for you.”

 

So I hang around for 5 minutes or so looking at the company’s literature “… the best multi-screen IPTV/OTT solution provider” wondering what the pantone code is for the orange they’ve used as it’s a rather nice shade and would look good in my bathroom and thinking about where to grab some lunch. After a few minutes a very energetic gentleman comes bounding my way. He introduces himself as the company’s CEO (“Excellent”, I think. “The top man”) and we get down to the business of the interview.

 

I attach the audio mic to the lapel on his jacket, hand him the transmitter box give him a quick briefing of what I’d like him to cover. “Just a brief overview of the company and what you do”. I connect the audio receiver to the input port on the camera find a semi-stable arm position and we’re ready to go.

 

Hit record…

 

After 10 seconds or so I notice that there’s no audio coming through to the camera so I stop the interviewee mid flow, apologise for doing so and then try to work out why there’s no audio. After a few more seconds of tinkering, I realise that I had forgotten to switch on the transmitter which is now sitting in the gentleman’s inside jacket pocket… doh!

 

Apologising again, I fish the transmitter out of his pocket, flick the power switch to ‘on’ and with one last apology, pop it back into his pocket. My interviewee thankfully  takes all of this in good humour and now, at last, we’re really ready to go.

 

Camera recording? Check. Audio coming through? Check. In focus? Check. Subject composed within the picture guidelines? Check. Did he just say something about a USB stick? Yes, he’s fiddling with it, must be important, pan down a bit.. Back up to his face now, still in focus, audio still coming through, background noise not too bad, picture quality okay, still roughly in the centre of the image, not too shaky (although my arm is beginning to ache now), Oh…okay he’s finished his piece. I wasn’t really listening to what he said (too busy concentrating on the mechanics of the video recording,) but I’m sure I can use something from it.

 

I retrieve my equipment from about his person, shake his hand, thank him for his time and take his business card as I’ll never remember his name otherwise (Ohhh.. how wrong could I be!) I’ll give it to my colleague so she can place his name caption on the screen when she edits the footage for me. I say my ‘goodbyes’ and ‘pleased to meet yous’ and wander off in search of another content opportunity and to find some lunch too.

 

A few days later, I’m back in the office and running through the couple of hours of footage and many interviews I managed to record, before saving it all back to our network drive. Skipping through the B roll stuff, the ‘panning the crowd’ shots and the arty logo angles, I find the start of my interview with the friendly energetic gentleman and decide to watch it back so I can have a listen to what he actually said during the filming…

 

And it’s then that the realisation of what a huge opportunity I had missed slowly crept over me…

 

You know those scenes in movies where something upsetting has happened and you hear one of the characters shouting an elongated “Noooooooooo……” against a cinematic backdrop of a flock of birds suddenly taking flight out of a tree…? Yes? You know the ones I mean?

 

Well picture me doing exactly that…

 

What had I done? Only missed the chance of an ‘off the chart GkF’ interview is what I had done! 

 

I had the pleasure of meeting none other than Mr Dov Moran, the man who invented the flash memory drive aka the USB stick!  That thing that everyone has at least 10 of sitting in their office drawers. That thing no bigger than your thumbnail on which you can store the equivalent of a room full of music CD’s. That thing that he sold to SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6 Billion (that’s Billion not Million) dollars!... and I didn’t even know it.

 

To say that I could have kicked myself would be the understatement of the century and even now, two years later, I still get really angry with myself for not fully listening and recognising who it was I was talking to!

 

So, here for your viewing pleasure is the short video I recorded of Mr Moran speaking at TV Connect in 2014 about his latest company Comigo as well as some general reference to him being the inventor of something called a USB stick or something like that…

 

While you’re watching, think of me behind the camera and concentrating on such things as white balance, audio levels and lining up the shot rather than actually listening to what he’s saying! <grabbing myself by the shoulders and shaking vigorously>

 

And if by chance you’re reading this Mr Moran, we’d really love to do a more in-depth interview with you (if you’re willing of course) and I promise, this time, I will be paying attention…. 


 

A self confessed Geek and a HUGE James Bond fan, Lisa is the Online Community Manager for the IET's Engineering Communities online community platform. In her spare time she can usually be found staring sulkily at a USB stick…