Royal Manitoba Winter Fair 2010
Posted on 11. Apr, 2010 by Scott Carnegie in Blog
Last weekend I headed into Brandon Manitoba to attend the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair 2010. My main purpose in going was to attend the trade show to talk to vendors about doing some video production for them. Most booths don’t have any video at all, not even a slide show, and a video is a great marketing tool to play at places like a trade show, especially if the business deals with tourism which has the potential for great images. Of the 5 or so tourism booths I approached, none of them had a video, a good chance for me to do my pitch! Will it pay off? Time will tell.
On the way to Brandon I was texting people trying to set-up some meetings and visits while I would be there. One of the folks I was in touch with is Greg Sherris, who is an instructor at Assinboine Community College, my Alma Matter,
with whom I try to visit when I am in town. He also works at the Keystone Centre in their video production department doing live production of events going on in the arena such as Brandon Wheat Kings games. It happens that they needed one more body for that nights production so he asked me if I was in. Hmmm, do I want to get paid for doing what I love? Sure! So I ended up spending the night operating a camera “at ice level” close to the action for some horse jumping competitions, a super dogs show and some other horse related events. Those horses kick up a lot of dust! The gear was pretty covered by the end of the night, and so was I.
It was nice to run into some former co-workers and classmates at the show, both working on the video production and just walking around the concourse to watch the show.
One of the other things I wanted to get done while I was there was to meet with the folks over at iTVBrandon. After CKX closed their doors about 6 months ago it left open a huge market; people that wanted local news coverage and businesses that still wanted to advertise and reach customers, and iTVBrandon launched a few months ago to fill that gap.
It’s run by some former CKX employees who saw the need and made it happen, launching a new business. They are small for now and I see a lot of room for growth as their business model is refined and developed. I met with Nate and Shaun over nachos (I may have been the only one eating the nachos) to introduce myself and see if we can do some business together. There aren’t a lot of companies doing video production in Brandon and the iTVbrandon team will likely have some projects come their way because of their profile in the What City. We talked about the possibility of doing some business together and partnering on some projects should the workload suit it. I lived in Brandon for a long time and look forward to doing some more work out there.
In all a pretty productive weekend, got to shoot some footage, meet some new people and hopefully plant the seeds for some future work.
