They have a series of “personal story” videos that show the positive impact that the United Way have had on the lives of the peoples using their services. We spent the day shooting footage of Cindy Little, both at work and at home, and ended up with a very moving story.

Below are pictures from the shoot and the final video is at the bottom of this post.

Photos courtesy of Doug Little Photography and Erica Glasier.

We shot the video for this project a few months ago, and I was interested to see how it would be edited together. Usually I end up cutting footage myself that I shoot, but in this case another editor worked on it. Editing is such a craft, and a storytelling medium, that seeing how another storyteller interprets the footage I shot is not an experience I often have, and it can be a bit uneasy of a feeling, hoping that they do the footage justice.

As you can see below, the results are fantastic! The pacing is great, the music very fitting and the emotion conveyed through the edit fits perfectly what they were working to achieve. Great job all around, I’m glad that I was able to contribute to the final product. I don’t know if the footage from my Sony Z1U camera has ever looked so good!

Here are all 6 videos.

Suicide Affects Us All: You Can Help from Manitoba Suicide Line on Vimeo.

Suicide Affects Us All: A Story of Hope from Manitoba Suicide Line on Vimeo.

Suicide Affects Us All: John’s Story from Manitoba Suicide Line on Vimeo.

Suicide Affects Us All: Pearl’s Story from Manitoba Suicide Line on Vimeo.

Suicide Affects Us All: First Peoples Perspectives from Manitoba Suicide Line on Vimeo.

Suicide Affects Us All: Carson’s Story from Manitoba Suicide Line on Vimeo.

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.

I first learned to hard code with HTML way back in 1996, and I didn’t go in depth learning new tools such as java, CSS and others, so I had fallen behind in my web skills, which is why I hire other people to do it for me when necessary. With WordPress though it takes care of a lot of those things that CSS provides, in an interface that’s pretty easy to use.

So, take a look around, watch some videos, and enjoy. All of the videos on the site are now in a high-quality flash format, rather than the very compressed WMV’s I used to use.