They were a lot of work to produce and I’m proud of the team at the OHC and MediaCircus.TV for putting together such unique videos.

Manitoba Workplace Health and Safety – Eritrean Community from George Harrison on Vimeo.

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Manitoba Workplace Health and Safety – Punjabi Community from George Harrison on Vimeo.

The team at MediaCircus.TV are proud to have been a part of this project and look forward to the reaction from the Punjabi community at this great event.

It’s usually bitter-sweet to finish a project, espeically one that is worked over such a long stretch of time. It’s nice to ahve a complete project that I can publicize, it’s nice to get that last payment, but it’s sad to leave the people you’ve been working with on it.

Thanks to Karen, Tej and Charnjit for a great experience in producing this project and helping me learn about Punjabi people and culture in the process.

Monday morning I was at Palliser Furntiture shooting some visuals of Punjabi employees for the Occupational Health Centre“Workplace Health and Safety” video being done for member of the Punjabi community. Palliser has always been very accommodating with us and very helpful in making their employees available for us. In fact there was a work slow down there recently but rather than cancelling the shoot date they had the people we were going to be using come in for an extra day so that we could still go forward with the shoot, full paid of course. Thanks to Val and James over at Palliser Furniture.  

Next up was a shoot at Hep Communications. It was a green screen shoot for a company called Diamond Retirement. Hep is working on their website and they want a video of the owners, Daryl and Karen Diamond, to play on the front page; this was somewhat similar to an earlier shoot I did for Hep for a site they built for moving company Quick Transfer.

It was one of the coldest days this week, schools were closed and people stayed home to be warm and cozy but we toughed it out and made it down to Hep for the shoot. I brought along my “portable studio”, green screen background, lights, wireless mics, HD camera and the needed accessories.  

I’ve been doing a lot of chroma keywork in the past year. Getting the green screen and it’s accessories has been one of the best purchases I’ve made; not only does it get me work it also gives me a chance to improve my technique. Creating a good green screen shot can be tricky; the clothes and hair have to be right, the lighting has to be right, the distance to the background has to be right; if any of those are lacking it’s much more difficult to remove the green later. 

Working off of a memorized script, such as Daryl and Karen did, is rarely easy, even for the pro’s. I recall one shoot I did a few years ago where the on-screen talent needed over 30 takes to get their lines right. OK, it was me, doing a stand up for a news report I was VJ’ing. So I re-assure any client I work with doing a project like this not to worry about taking 5 or 6 takes, even the pro’s do the same.

Sarah has been over at Hep for about 5 months in the Marketing Deperament and this was her first video shoot that she was running and was on hand to observe the process. We all had a good time and it was nice to work with Hep again. It went pretty smooth and the video should be up on their website in a few weeks. 

2 previous clients of mine, Anders and Scott Burton, offered to provide testimonials for me to use in promotions. Since MediaCircus.TV is a media company, I thought, why not video testimonials? This week I went to them and they spoke a little about what I did for them, how smooth it went and how quick the turn around was on their projects. With Scott he had his video for about an hour when I started seeing it pop up on Facebook and Google Video! I will be refreshing the MediaCircus.TV promotional video (as seen on the main page) with some new visuals and these testimonials in the coming months.

The host was Charnjit, one of the people from the Punjabi community that the Occupational Health Centre is working with on this project. She did very well! As far as I know this was her first time in an on-camera role like this.

The script is in Punjabi and is one of the many non-English languages that I’ve worked with in the past few years. I really like getting this experience where we work with a variety of languages within various cultural contexts; to me it’s an education as much as it is production.

It was nice to get back to work on it after taking almost a month off from any production work while I was on vacation. This video is slated to be completed near the end of November. The rough cut will be done sometimes this week, then we start filling in all of the extras like b-roll, graphics. sound and still pictures.