This month Sarah and I have been working on a very cool project for the Englewood Hospital and Medical Center of New Jersey. The topic of is Blood Management and Bloodless Surgery and todays shoot was open-heart surgery.
Bloodless surgery has been proven effective and safer than some traditional techniques and is often employed when a blood transfusion is not an option for a patient for medical or religious grounds.
I’ve filmed medical procedures in the past, but this was truly intense.
Sarah stayed home for this one. Arion Doerr was my assistant and he assured me that this kind of thing wouldn’t bother him, but just in case, our escort, Ramon, assured him that there were two doors he could bolt through if he felt the least bit uncomfortable. Well, Arion earned his merit badge today for hanging in there for over 4 hours.
We were given strict instructions on operating room conduct and shown a perimeter that was safe for us to, well, operate in. We were dressed in scrubs, hairnets and masks and were ready to go. I’ll admit that I hardly slept the night before. I‘m pretty good at watching this kind of stuff without getting queasy, but there is always a bit of anxiety and neither of us had had a chance to grab breakfast at 5 am.
To keep things manageable, we avoided any additional accessories like a depth of field adaptor or anything else that I might complicate the filming process. I used a 32 & 16 gig card in the Sony EX3. This provided me with slightly less than three hours of uninterrupted filming at 1080 60i.
Although I did some handheld shots, the best results were on sticks and a having the tall 526 Manfrotto was truly an asset. The best visuals were from around 7 feet and I was able to flip up the viewfinder and monitor off the internal screen from below.
The lighting was a mix of fluorescent and halogen and I preset all my white balance settings during the preparations so the green scrubs would not affect the balance. I also used the 684 Tru Cut filter to eliminate any infrared contamination common to the first two EX cameras.
It was fascinating. While you’re watching the procedure through the camera, it’s just like watching it at home on the Discovery Channel. It was also a bit humbling, as well. To see the patient’s heart beating, with his life in the hands of the surgeons and support staff. All so flippin’ real and incredible.You count your blessings on the spot.
The operation and the filming were both successful and I have a new, genuine appreciation for medical professionals.
We packed the gear, looked at each other and I said “Lunch?”.
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