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Q:
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How did you first find the soldiers of Blue Platoon, Killer Troop?
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A:
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I was getting ready to go to Iraq and had been noticing more and more news coming out of Mosul and Combat Outpost Rabiy. They call it “Combat Outpost Killer.” I saw a TIME article about the area, and we started pushing to get embedded there. We ended up spending between seven and eight weeks there. It was an active area. We were interested in how these outposts were affecting the war.
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Q:
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Can you talk a little about the “Lucky Charms” piece?
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A:
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We talked to some of the guys about what their good luck charms were as they went into battle. I’d sit them down and say, “Tell me about your lucky charm. What does it mean to you?”
Over the course of the next year, two of the guys from the piece were killed and others were wounded. The numbers were crazy. A lot of the guys in that piece were hurt. So we picked the same guys to focus on for “Killer Blue.”
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Q:
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At what point did you know how you were going to tell the story?
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A:
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We were shooting all this great stuff, and I was really focused on daily assignments. But I kept in touch with the solders. I heard from the families. And at the homecoming at Fort Hood [in January], I did exit interviews with all the guys.
Then I said, “How are we going to do this?” A group of us sat down for two days in a room just to storyboard. After that, the editing went really quickly. I’ve only been doing video for two years. I’m a still photographer. This is the first time I ever attempted to do anything long form. I thought, “Oh, my gosh. This is daunting.”
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Q:
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How long has the Associated Press been doing this kind of multimedia project?
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A:
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I’m part of the HD photo team. We just started going out and shooting video essays with HD cameras. We kept getting all this material, and then I went and got training at Media Storm. [My bosses] gave me the okay to do the project, and once it came out, they were happy with the reception it got, especially the amount of time people spent online looking at it. We’ve got really talented people, but this is the first time we’ve attempted long-form video.
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Q:
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What were some of the first media outlets to pick it up?
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A:
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I contacted Meredith Birkett at MSNBC. I emailed it to her. She said, “This is great. We’re going to put it up on the home page on the anniversary of the war.” Then NPR put it on their front page for the anniversary, too. Then a lot of newspapers ran the other [non-video] parts of the project.
We don’t have a great way to distribute it. It was really just us calling our friends. For this kind of stuff, no one expects AP to do it. “You did what?” they say. “I can’t believe that you guys put this out. I can’t believe this came from AP.”
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Q:
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Could you talk a little about your deliberate effort to avoid standard broadcast narrative techniques?
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A:
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When we set out to do this, we knew we didn’t want to duplicate what television does. We want to shoot like a still photographer would—we don’t need to interject ourselves into it. We’re not going to tell the story. We’re going to let the story unfold. We don’t do standups. We don’t do voiceovers.
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Q:
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Is “Killer Blue” a documentary?
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A:
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Yes. I’m not a film guy, but I know that everything I did is what a documentarian does. They let things unfold in front of them. I was there when the car bomb went off. I wasn’t telling the story after the fact.
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