Diane Rose-Solomon
Diane's Diary #27: Filming on a Rainy Day in Florida
Note: This is Excerpt #27 in Diane’s Diary. If you would like to read previous excerpts, you can find Diane’s Diary 1-26 here.
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This part of the story begins in Diane's Diary #19. So if you are just tuning in now, you don't have to start all the way at the beginning.
Saturday morning, October 26th, 2019. Since it was a Saturday, and we were filming with a family (including a teenager!) we decided to start at 10. So, I got to sleep in until 7:30! I checked out of the hotel and meet up with the crew at 10.
The weather was still okay, but it was forecast to rain the rest of the day and Mike, my Director/Producer, suggested we get some more b-roll outdoors. The plan for this day was to go see Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school. It was intense. It is not my intention to sensationalize the story at all. The news already does that. But Kaitlyn did have a profound experience after the shootings which may, or may not, have affected her epilepsy. Dr. Zakaria had explained that mental health can be correlated with epilepsy. She, along with much of the community has (or at least had back then) PTSD, and understandably so.
Regardless, the February 14th, 2018 incident is an important part of everyone’s life, particularly the Parkland community, and we wanted to honor that. We grabbed a few quick angles of Kaitlyn standing in front of the school (no school signs- I needed to film from public property and I don’t want to get in trouble) and then the skies opened up as they do in Florida and we ran for cover from the rain, particularly because the fancy camera isn’t waterproof.

We went back to Kaitlyn’s house and I wanted to get some “hanging around the house” footage so we did some more b-roll of Mom and the girls hanging out in Mikaela’s room (not Kaitlyn’s. They just moved in and Kaitlyn hasn’t unpacked yet.)
And then we got some footage of them in the kitchen repeating some of the info from the interviews the day before so we would have some options outside of the sit-down interview. We had a bit of a glitch as we had run out of media cards. I was not willing to erase anything until I saw it. So, we used a different camera and then realized that wasn’t going to work well and then Marcos, our cameraman, found one more card so we finished with one camera which, if we want to use the footage will be fine…
To Be Continued!
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