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.

Kilinic Community Health Care provides health, counselling and education services for people in Manitoba, with offices in Brandon and Winnipeg; one of the services they run is the Manitoba Suicide Line. The MSL is launching a new website (designed by Tactica) in the next few months to bring the hotline more attention and part of that launch includes video interviews with people affected by suicide.

A few weeks ago we traveled to Brandon Manitoba to shoot the first round of these interviews. I lived in Brandon for many years and got my start in media production while living there as an EFP/ENG camera operator for the recently closed TV station CKX-TV.  I enjoyed the chance to go back there and do some production. The morning of the shoot I had time to head to my alma-matter, Assiniboine Community College, to speak to current Media Production students who are in the same course I took many years ago.

The second set of interviews were done last week at Klinics head offices in Winnipeg.

The interviews were done first-person style, with the subjects looking directly at the camera, so that the visitors to their site will get a more personal message when they view them. Some of the interviewees were people that had attempted suicide, some were family members and/or friends of people that had completed suicide and some were councillors and people involved in their communities.

The subject matter was very different than anything I have worked on before. Talking to people about their very personal experiences in a sensitive subject was a humbling experience, and the people at Kilinic in Brandon and in Winnipeg were great to work with.

The videos and website launch will be highlighted here of course, I look forward to seeing them completed.