So often as producers and photographers we fight for access. Without it, we have no stories. So it was with my story about Michael Flocco, a Delaware sheet-metal worker who lost his only son at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. As soon as I read in a Pentagon media advisory that Mr. Flocco was helping to rebuild the Pentagon while living in a camper in suburban Washington I knew it had the potential of being a great story. But what about access? I had also heard that he was very media shy and had turned down network television requests to shoot stories about him.

Four months later, as I started the editing process, the most pressing problem was not the access, but how to deal with the total access that I had received. It was a question of what to include and what to keep out of the edit.

I don’t really know a formula for making people feel comfortable on camera. The most I can do is to demonstrate that I’m committed to the story and the rest is the relationship between producer and subject. Whatever it was, it worked between Mr. Flocco and myself. Soon after I started videotaping him, he began opening up, speaking honestly and emotionally on camera. Soon after that, I was with him during some of his darkest days of depression and alcoholism. 

After logging the 30 tapes and doing some preliminary editing, our biggest issue was how far to go into Mr. Flocco’s drinking and depression. Of course, it belonged in the story as it was part of how he’s coping with loss of his son. At the same time, I didn’t want to exploit his pain and alcohol problem for the sake of more powerful video. In the end, after consultations with my boss Tom Kennedy and others, we decided to use the content from the “depression days” sequence only as it directly related to the storyline of dealing with the loss of Matt. There were plenty of other shocking and powerful quotes and actions during much of my time with Mr. Flocco, but we all say things under the influence of alcohol that we wouldn’t normally say. I left all of those things out and used a more sober interview under much of the drinking footage to give the visuals the proper context they needed. 

Shooting and Editing
I shot and edited this story over four months, though not exclusively. I continued to do daily work, though at a lighter than usual pace. After the first few days with Mr. Flocco, I tried to target my shooting around important events such as the first and last softball games in Delaware. I pieced together a rough edit about halfway through the process to get the first round of feedback from Tom Kennedy and others. This edit become the basis for a checklist of the parts of the story I still didn’t have or needed to improve upon. After I felt that I had filled all the holes from the first edit, Tom and I sat down to sketch out a rough script for the piece. We choose the order of each scene and what information through the interviews we wanted to cover during this time.

I edited the first cut in 4 days and then worked with my editors at washingtonpost.com and producers at ABC News to shave off seven minutes so it would fit into the time allotted for ABC News Nightline UpClose, where it aired on Aug. 16. Getting rid of the first 4 minutes wasn’t difficult, but the other three and especially the final 30 seconds was the most painful part. Incidentally, the process of cutting time required twice as much time as the original edit. In the end, being forced to trim that much time off your piece turns out to be a good exercise in determining the core aspects of your story.

Response
The response to this project has been overwhelming. I’ve received dozens of calls and E-mails. We even received a song inspired and based on the show. It was composed and recorded by a viewer who saw the ABC broadcast in New Jersey. Probably the most satisfying part of the feedback was to be able to connect Mr. and Mrs. Flocco directly with viewers through an Internet discussion washingtonpost.com conducted after the video was shown. Since the story ran on ABC, several other television outlets have approached us wanting to use parts of the story. Portions of the video aired on MSNBC and NewsChannel 8, a local Washington, D.C., cable station. CNN, NBC, and Maryland Public Television have also expressed interest in airing parts of the show. Finally, ABC will end their daylong Sept. 11 coverage with a re-broadcast of the story on Nightline UpClose.

Technical Details
I shot the video in anamorphic 16:9 mode with the Sony PD-150, a wide angle adapter, a Sennheiser ME-66 on-camera microphone, and a Lectrosonics wireless system. The broadcast and web versions were completely edited with Final Cut Pro 3, on a Macintosh G4 laptop and a LaCie 120 gig firewire hard drive.

Contact Travis Fox at email@travisfox.com