Tuesday, January 29, 2008

NEW CJ'S SPEECH

Ivor Archie gives his maiden speech as Chief Justice during a special sitting of the Supreme Court, and of course it's the lead story on all the stations.
But.
Since it's a changing of the guard, some enterprising Assignments Editor should have anticipated that there would have been speeches from the floor - DPP Geoffrey Henderson, Law Association President Russell Martineau and SC Martin Daly.
What we saw of them while they addressed the CJ was the backs of their heads! Not one single frontal shot of any of them.
There was one camera facing them and we suspect it was the Information Division.

So no Head of News, Senior Producer or Assignment Editor thought to contact the Info. Div. or even the Supreme Court to find out how the "ceremony" would pan out and then make a decision on how many cameras would be needed?
You do realise that the next time you get to shoot something like this will be about sixteen years from now? Anyway most of the senior newsroom people would have moved on by then and we hope there should be some young, fresh, enterprising blood in those newsrooms.

At least we hope your various cameramen used the opportunity to get good close up shots of all the senior judges who were sitting with the CJ, because we would hate to think you had them all under the radar and when the next crisis arises in the judiciary you would have to resort to using newspaper photographs of any of them!