The chair was set, the map drawers were lit from the side, and the framed 5×7 photo of Brad with his grandfather sat on the desk in front of him. We had 2 cameras on him. He took a breath. The room went quiet.
Then he started talking, and we let him.
Brad Greene is the Mechanical Heritage Team Lead at CPKC's Calgary yard. He's also a US Army veteran, UH-60 Blackhawk Crewchief, Ft. Hood, Camp Humphreys, Ft. Campbell, deployed to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division in 2003 and 2004. His grandfather served as a medic with Canadian forces in England during the Second World War, then worked the Northern Alberta Railway and the British Columbia Railway for 40 years. Brad has followed those tracks closely.
Jenna Kardal, CPKC's Communications Advisor, brought us in to interview him for an internal video to release on November 11, 2024, Remembrance Day in Canada and Veterans Day in the United States. The brief asked for a 2 to 3 minute cut, ready in 7 days, with French and Spanish captions for CPKC's cross-border workforce.
1 day, 3 locations
We shot at Building 7 at CPKC's Heritage Mechanical Yard. PPE was current, parking was on the SE side, no stairs. We arrived at 14:00 to set up for a 15:00 interview. 3 locations on the day: a 12 ft × 12 ft map room with overhead fluorescents we killed in favour of a side key, the Mechanical Heritage shop with its restored cars under existing overhead halogen and LED, and the yard for B-roll if time allowed.
The map room had what the brief called "gravitas": vintage drawers, white walls, a hardhat on the shelf, and natural quiet. We hung Brad's service uniform on the drawers behind his chair. The 5×7 framed photo of Brad with his grandfather sat on his desk where he could reach for it.
2 cameras, 1 subject
A and B cam, lavalier on Brad, soft key from camera-left, fill bounced into the wall. We didn't move during answers. When Brad reached for a photograph, B cam was already there. When he paused, neither operator broke the silence to redirect.
The brief said Brad was a "natural storyteller." Jenna had asked him to react with emotion if he wanted, with permission to pause. We kept the room set up for that.
What we don't do in an interview about loss
We don't fill silence. We don't ask follow-up questions to push for more emotion, Brad told us when he was ready to keep going. We don't change shot when someone is in the middle of a sentence about a friend they lost in combat. We position, we wait, and we trust the person in front of the lens to bring us the story.
Brad served 8 years. He lost his best friend and platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Scott Rose, in a helicopter shoot-down near Tikrit, Iraq. He was promoted to interim platoon sergeant the same day. The line he chose to give us was the one he and Scott had shared on the flight line before Scott was killed: "I hope you and I can earn this when we get home."
That's the line we held in the cut. We didn't soundtrack underneath it. We didn't B-roll over it. We held on Brad's face.
