It can be a hard sell when you go into a room and try to get somebody to help you do a story. I don’t have a survival camp nor do I know how to get a dog to bite a reporter….so you see, you need to sell somebody on your idea, while getting them to help you. When I set up our “Lost in the Woods” story, I quickly became a fan of the Gaston County Emergency Medical Team.

We started meeting about our idea, a month before the shoot. I went into a room of about 6 EMS personnel and pitched our story. They agreed with enthusiasm and pulled out all the stops to make sure it would be a good story that would hit home with you, the viewer. That doesn’t always happen. There are a lot of organizations in our area, who would have laughed at my request. These guys took it seriously. As a producer, I wanted to make a story that would have impact with the viewer. I appreciated that.

The first concern was safety. We wanted to put Tony in as real life of a scenario as we could, you know, without actually doing him harm. That would not look good on my resume. “Set up shot where reporter died or fell off a cliff.” GEMS (Gaston County Emergency Medical Services) made sure he was safe, while respecting the idea of our shoot. They put out a team of Emergency Personnel, led by Jeff Hicks and Darren Ledford. They set up their Rehabilitation Trailer, with food, lanterns AND heaters. We also had Crowder’s Mountain Park Rangers with us at all times. We had to keep an eye on Tony while keeping our scenario as real-life as possible. What you see in the story is Tony alone with his camera, but just minutes away we had a whole staging area, where we were waiting to respond, if anything went wrong. You can see pictures of that in our photo slideshow.

The concern with Tony is that he would get hypothermic. We knew he would get cold, but the challenge would be to get to him before anything got serious. We trusted Tony to use his two-way radio when conditions got too severe. He called us when he was mild hypothermic. He made the call to end the shoot just in time. I think if he stayed out much longer, we may have had more of a situation. I was nervous when we got to him, he was out of sorts and had trouble hiking back to our base camp. I could definitely tell the elements had gotten to him. Click here for behind the scenes photos

These shoots take a lot of setting up. I place the call and pitch the story, but you need a whole team to pull of a story like this one and do it safely. This was definitely a team effort.

Click here for web only video of Tony lost in the woods