It was a little after 6:00 p.m. on January 12 when my mother came running into our Belleville kitchen to tell us that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had just hit Haiti. My wife took a concerned look at me as she ran into the bedroom to filter more information. I slowly poked at my spaghetti dinner, knowing my world was about to change. "It happened near the capital," Rhonda said with a knowing look. I'd been to Port-au-Prince 15 years earlier and knew it was an overcrowded capital city of two million. It was very poor and very desperate. I knew right then and there I would be leaving for Haiti. Within two hours, I had driven to my office in Toronto and finalized my preparation to go.

The year is 2050. Society is cold, stark, and impersonal. People live only for the thrills found on "life discs," tiny microchips played to their brains through transmitters implanted in their arms. They are fed the ultimate in virtual reality, and it's as addictive as any drug.

The struggle between humanity and a desensitized society is the premise for Amplifier, a short, sci-fi drama that is the brainchild of writer/director Glenn Forbes. Director of photography for the 35mm film, shot in the greater Toronto area last spring, was Tony Wannamaker, who said work on the project "was technically rewarding."

As one of the two commercial DOPs for Toronto 1's Creative Services department, I recently had the opportunity to lens the first commercial to be shot in Canada with Sony's new blue-violet laser optical disc camcorder called the XDCAM, specifically the PDW-530 model. Toronto 1 is the first Canadian broadcaster to switch from tape-based acquisition to the XDCAM.

Prepping for the commercial shoot - for Richard Killen and Associates with Nick Appleton directing - I tested the camera in various field environments.