I regularly shoot video to go with my stories, including covering breaking news and developing enterprise shoots and outside-the-box story ideas.
AP reporter’s terrifying trip on 1,000-foot-high glass slide
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers. Photo by AP photographer Richard Vogel.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — I’ve jumped out of a plane from 13,000 feet. I’ve ridden 400-foot-tall roller coasters that top speeds of 100 mph, and I once found myself using my fingernails to clutch the side of a rock face way too steep to climb without gear.
Heights have never fazed me. Until the Skyslide, a terrifying glass tube on the outside of the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles. It’s open to the public Saturday, and journalists were given an early chance to try it out.
Packaged AP video with my footage, which includes a combination of GoPro and iPhone shots: https://twitter.com/APWestRegion/status/746119049138974720/video/1
Videos I posted to YouTube:
Foundry begins process of creating SAG Award statuettes
Video shot by Amanda Lee Myers
Rodney King’s daughter stands side by side with LAPD
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rodney King’s daughter was just 7 when her father was beaten bloody by officers with the Los Angeles Police Department.
She was eating breakfast when it came on the morning news — video footage showing LAPD officers kicking and hitting her unarmed father dozens of times with batons. It gave her nightmares for years.
In a striking scene that stood in sharp contrast to the 1991 beating, the now 32-year-old Lora King stood shoulder to shoulder with about a dozen LAPD officers Thursday, hugging many of them. She was there to join them in a talk to young people who have had their own run-ins with police.
Her message: It’s more important to build bridges with officers than to stand against them.
“That’s actually what my dad stood for, so I’m following in his footsteps. He had no hatred in his heart for police,” King said.
Los Angeles 1st in US with subway body scanners
Video by Amanda Lee Myers
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles’ subway will become the first mass transit system in the U.S. to install body scanners that screen passengers for weapons and explosives, officials said Tuesday.
The deployment of the portable scanners, which project waves to do full-body screenings of passengers walking through a station without slowing them down, will happen in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, who runs the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s law enforcement division.
The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person’s body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour.
Once homeless, Iraq War veteran moves into unique new home
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers
MIDWAY CITY, Calif. (AP) — Vernon Poling was 44 years old when he finally got a home of his own.
The Iraq War veteran was medically discharged from the Army in 2014, had to quit his trucking job for medical reasons, and found himself living out of his pickup last year in Orange County, a sprawling area of Southern California known for beaches, Disneyland and high housing costs.
Poling was homeless for seven months before he found temporary housing in the area. He then learned about Potter’s Lane, an apartment complex made from recycled shipping containers, just for homeless veterans. It’s believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S.
On a sunny Friday in April, Poling walked into his 480-square-foot apartment for the first time, set down his backpack on his new floor and took it all in.
Husband-wife team uses hawks to scare off ‘pest’ birds in LA
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A hawk named Riley soars between high-rises in downtown Los Angeles. Smaller birds take notice. And take flight.
Riley lands on a branch, surveys the concrete jungle below and swoops down to land on the gloved hand of her owner.
Blazer-clad professionals on their way to lunch do double-takes.
Husband-and-wife falconers Alyssa and Mike Bordonaro are “The Hawk Pros,” just one of a number of Southern California bird-abatement businesses. They and their birds of prey are hired guns, brought in to scare away seagulls, pigeons and other “pest birds” that create nuisances and leave behind messes.
Treasure lost at sea in 1857 shipwreck goes on display
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — More than $50 million worth of gold bars, coins and dust that’s been described as the greatest lost treasure in U.S. history is about to make its public debut in California after sitting at the bottom of the ocean for more than 150 years.
The 3,100 gold coins, 45 gold bars and more than 80 pounds (36 kilograms) of gold dust recovered from the wreckage of the S.S. Central America steamship are now sitting in a makeshift laboratory just south of Los Angeles.
Bob Evans, the chief scientist on the original voyage that discovered the shipwreck and its treasure in 1988, is now painstakingly cleaning each piece of gold by hand, soaking it in a solution and brushing off rust and grime that accumulated as the treasure sat 7,000 feet below sea level.
“This is a whole new season of discovery,” Evans told The Associated Press this week from the laboratory in Santa Ana. “We are now peering beneath the grime and the rust that is on the coins, removing those objects and those substances and getting to look at the treasure as it was in 1857.”
Short trolley of ‘La La Land’ fame to roll again
Angels Flight, Los Angeles’ hillside railroad, is set to rise again. The funky funicular that carried Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling to the top of downtown L.A. in the movie “La La Land” is set to reopen to the general public.
Subway scientist seeks fossils under Los Angeles
The Los Angeles subway system is expanding and so too are the number of prehistoric fossils being recovered as crews dig beneath the city. Paleontologist Ashley Leger is on hand during the process to preserve fossils.
California joins lawsuit on 3D-printed guns
Video by Amanda Lee Myers
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California is joining a lawsuit against the federal government to block the release of blueprints that show how to make 3D-printed plastic guns.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Thursday he will join other attorneys general challenging a settlement the Trump administration reached with a Texas-based company to release the plans on the Internet.
A Seattle federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked release of the blueprints.
“Donald Trump will have his fingerprints all over these weapons if they start to be produced in places like California,” Becerra said. “We think it’s crazy. We think it’s outrageous. It will make it nearly impossible for law enforcement to know who has weapons and what kind.”
Couple together 17 years to marry on Rose Parade float
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers.
IRWINDALE, Calif. (AP) — Christian Guntert was lying on his back, gluing seeds to the bottom of a giant faux pizza for a Rose Parade float when a teenager made a casual comment about his wife.
When the 58-year-old Guntert told the girl that he and his longtime girlfriend actually weren’t married, she screamed: “You’re not married?!”
The shocked question reverberated in the 80,000-square-foot California warehouse last December, where teams of volunteers were building a dozen floats for the annual, nationally televised parade in Pasadena.
Soon, volunteers had surrounded Guntert and his girlfriend of 17 years, 56-year-old Susan Brown, offering their various skills to make a wedding happen right then and there on the float. One said he was an ordained minister and could perform the ceremony, another offered to sing during the wedding, and a photographer said she could snap photos.
“Susan kind of looked at herself and at me, we were all dirty and covered in glue and flower parts,” Guntert said. “Susan said, ‘You know, I’d really like to have a pretty dress.'”
US Marines Ad Campaign Stresses Good Citizenship
‘We got him,’ victim’s father says of ‘Grim Sleeper’ killer
Video by Amanda Lee Myers. Story by Myers and Brian Melley.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — By the time police found Alicia Alexander’s naked body under a mattress in an alley in 1988, six other young, black women had died similar deaths in the neighborhood known as South Central Los Angeles.
It would take decades for police to make an arrest and a half dozen more years for justice to reach the families of the victims Thursday when a Los Angeles County jury found a former garbage man guilty of 10 murders known as the “Grim Sleeper” serial killings.
The convicted man, Lonnie Franklin Jr., looked unfazed as the verdicts were read and Alexander’s parents and other victims’ kin in the gallery quietly wept and dabbed their eyes with tissues.
“They read it and I said, ‘We got him,'” Alexander’s father, Porter Alexander Jr., said outside court. “It took all this time, but we got him.”
Graphic photos begin ‘Grim Sleeper’ serial killing trial
Video and story by Amanda Lee Myers.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Their bodies were dumped in alleys and garbage bins in South Los Angeles, some naked, some covered with mattresses and trash. Most had been shot in the chest after some type of sexual contact, others strangled.
As prosecutor Beth Silverman showed photo after photo of the 10 victims to a packed courtroom on Tuesday, family members of the dead young women shook as they wept. Some covered their faces, others had to walk out.
It was an emotional beginning to the long-awaited “Grim Sleeper” trial more than 30 years after the first victim’s death.
Lonnie Franklin Jr. has pleaded not guilty to killing nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007 in one of the city’s most notorious serial killer cases. Franklin, 63, has been behind bars awaiting trial for nearly six years since his arrest in 2010.
Readers discuss impact of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ after Harper Lee’s death
In a 1991 survey on books that have affected people’s lives, the Libary of Congress found “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible. Following author Harper Lee’s death Friday, The Associated Press asked people around the United States to talk about how “To Kill a Mockingbird” impacted them.
Amanda Lee Myers 