When the St. Louis Cardinals are playing, the game is everywhere. You can’t escape it. Take a walk, and you hear it coming from people’s homes, cars, on the radio, at the grocery store. It’s everywhere.

And that includes the maternity floors at Barnes Jewish Hospital.

Most of the staff photographers here have been working on a project about how the game of baseball is woven into the fabric of  the lives of St. Louisans. During a brainstorming session, the idea to hang out on a maternity floor was thrown out. Having just given birth to my first child a little over a year ago, I jumped at the chance.

I thought I was going to be doing still photographs along with some audio. So I was more than thrown for a loop when my editor asked me to do video. I was off for a year, and just returned to the Post-Dispatch full-time in March, so I had done a grand total of seven videos. Due to my limited experience, I was terrified, but shot my video as requested.

In my nervousness, I shot lots of pretty “still like” video frames of folks with cute newborns at the hospital, and nurses checking the score, but really overlooked my main interview. For those of you who’ve never shot video, those are REALLY IMPORTANT. Basically you have no way to string your whole piece together and tell the story without them.

As soon as I began the editing process I realized I had a problem. I am slower at editing than everyone else to begin with, but after a day of work I just could not make my piece come together. I had Robert Cohen take a look, and he immediately pointed out what was wrong. We tried several ways to make it work without a good interview….even me doing a voice over. Scary stuff I tell you. I was ready to scrap the whole thing.

But in the end, I went back to the hospital and did a proper interview with one of the nurses that had been working the day we shot the project. And with the help of Huy Mach, and his editing skills and video experience, I ended up with a piece I am actually proud of. And I learned a valuable lesson that I will never forget—-audio is as important, if not more than the images you’re recording when it comes to shooting video.