9/11 Documentary

The brief: While working in NYC on Operation Lindbergh – managing the scheduled Today Show appearance for the world’s first telesurgery – tragedy struck the city and our first instinct was to capture the events.

Walking downtown from midtown Manhattan – about 5 miles – was a surreal experience and took over 8 hours to complete as we interviewed people, helped whom we could, and tracked down friends and co-workers in the city.

The documentary was a way of making sense of the nonsensical, and everything about 9/11 made little sense except the profound sadness of everyone in the city.

Winter Olympics

The brief: Secure press credentials to the Albertville Olympics and embed two video crews with the Austrian speed skiing team, cover the event and provide event b-roll for the team’s sponsors and French television.

The most difficult part of the project was obtaining IOC press credentials; not a foregone conclusion until the games had nearly begun. Shooting in the French Alps was about not minding the cold.

Meeting a childhood hero like Franz Klammer made the environmental abuse worthwhile. The Olympic spectacle was alternatively thrilling and mundane as the athletic achievements gave way to the sheer size and scale of the logistics behind covering the various events and locations.

Chernobyl Disaster

The brief: accompany a medical aid fact finding mission to Chernobyl to research and report on the disaster’s effect on children’s orphanages in the region.

WARNING: The images in this video may be disturbing to some viewers. 11 days in the region, over 20 hours of footage shot in dozens of locations. This edit is not narrated and features a collection of the people and places visited during the mission. Much of the footage was featured on PBS and also used by a variety of government and NGO partners to advance aid programs in the region.

A profound experience for the more than 50 healthcare workers, aid organization leaders, government and NGO program leaders and policy experts

Haiti Earthquake

The brief: Document the company’s largest single corporate gift, $2m in medical supplies sent to Haiti following the devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 and injured hundreds of thousands more.

WARNING: The images in these videos may be disturbing to some viewers. Working with several aid organizations transporting the supplies I embedded with Hope Force International, Medical Teams International and World Relief as they attempted to re-open a hospital damaged in the disaster.

King’s Hospital would eventually serve hundreds of trauma patients and establish a clinic for primary care in the area. I filed several updates over the following weeks and months and after I returned home I edited a final piece for presentation during the company’s annual leadership meeting.

Canada’s First Telesurgery

The brief: Lead all marketing and PR for the world’s first telesurgery between two hospitals in Canada.

The project spanned more than six months and included developing an electronic PR kit and a broadcast exclusivity partnership with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Significant work was done as well with several federal ministries of health and human services and the hospital’s executive leadership.

The successful surgery was performed in February of 2003, less than two years after Operation Lindbergh and the media kit and media relations program generated significant national coverage throughout Canada and beyond

“Operation Lindbergh”

The brief: Lead global marketing and PR for the world’s first telesurgery as surgeons in NYC remove the gall bladder of a patient in an operating room in Strasbourg, France.

The project spanned more than a year and a half and included a host of partners and vendors who were all eager to be recognized for the achievement; France Telecom, AT&T, several academic institutions and even DARPA played a role. Managing partner expectations became as challenging as creating and executing the PR campaign.

Months of negotiations resulted in embargoed news exclusives for several partners: NBC Nightly News, Dateline, The Today Show, Time magazine, USA Today, and others. The surgery was performed successfully on Sept. 7, 2001, and all press events were to be preceded by a live global press conference scheduled for the morning of September 13, 2001 and originating from the Sheraton New York Times Square hotel. The events of 9/11 meant the cancellation of all public events, however the package did go on to air on several outlets, and was selected a year later by CNN as the medical story of the year.