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.

With most of the shooting already done (just a few pick-ups here and there) I have been going pretty steady in the edit suite for several days. I’ve already worked on three projects tonight; The Punjabi video, The Film Training Manitoba Film Expo video and the Mindset Serious Games conference videos.

The Punjabi Workplace Health and Safety video is going to be packaged and delivered by Monday, and I’ve completed tonight what will hopefully be the final cut. This one went through 8 rounds of changes to get to the final, which isn’t too bad. For a 20 minute video, there were relatively few changes to make, credit goes to a solid script for that. The client has been very good in catching the spelling errors I’ve been making .

Jon Le has been the graphics designer on the Punjabi project and he’s done a great job. I used to work with Jon at A-Channel in 2000; we’ve both come a long way since then. I like to hire people that I’ve worked with in the past, and this is the first time I’ve worked with Jon on a project of my own, and he’s really captured the flavour of the Punjabi style with his graphics. Here are a few examples of what he created.

Back in November I shot footage for Film Training Manitoba’s Film Expo, and now is when it’s time to put the material together from it. I’m cutting 5:00, 2:00 and :30 videos promoting the Expo and Film Training Manitoba in general. I’ve finished the 5:00 version tonight and will tackle the other ones in the next few days.

I shot 3 hours of interviews and 2 hours of b-roll, and I’m condensing that all down into just a few minutes. There is some amazing b-roll in there, I wish I could use more of it. Maybe just a half-hour montage of nice b-roll to music; I think only camera operators would watch something like that. Picking the best to use is not an easy job, and going through the interviews took a lot longer than I thought since there was so much great material in them. FTM has a copy of all of the material I shot so there may be some future use for it.

And onto Mindset. Last year I did a series of videos for them for the Microsoft Canada Innovative Teachers Conference.  This year I am doing something similar for them for the Serious Games conference. 5 interviews were shot and I’ll be packaging them into 2 minute clips for conference attendees to look at before the conference starts. I’ll put them on my website for Mindset to download and they’ll either put them on YouTube or their own server; last year they did both.

I’ll be using the same music and graphics that I did for their project last year, which will help me get all of them edited in one day, since that’s what is budgeted. Here are some captures from that shoot.

I’ve been waiting for some graphics to render while I’ve been typing this post, looks like they’re almost done. Time to get back to the edit!

I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past few days adding in the b-roll that was shot last week after being away for the weekend.  Shaun Reomich from Gearhead Visual Productions helped us out with a shoot at a Petro-Canada owned by a Punjabi person; some footage at the Legislature, went for a ride in a Taxi to get some footage of the driver and headed to the Health Science Center kitchen where two Punjabi ladies let us get some footage of them in thier workplace. 

Hospitals are often hard places to get into for footage because of privacy concerns, but Lorie in the Communcatrions Department at the HSC was very accomodating. Once we itendified the Punjabi employees that were willing to be on camera she made the arrangements so that we could be there when the shcedules fit with both ladies shiftf. Thanks Lorie for making the shoot go so smooth.

I thought that I’d share a few of the ones that we’re considering to use; they are very well done and show some of the beauty of Punjabi people and places.

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.

There are a few more projects on the horizon that I’ll certainly reveal more details about as they get finalized, including a short film, details to come.