Video Artisan – a year in video film production

Video Artisan’s 1st birthday slipped past me unnoticed at the beginning of Feb. The fact that I’ve only just realised is testament to how busy, absorbing and enjoyable my first year back in video film production has been.

There’s been some significant milestones that’s for sure but none more so than picking up my first corporate video production commission derived purely from my own marketing efforts.  Having been into fishing in my youth part of the satisfaction comes from knowing you’ve set your bait out attractively enough for the fish to bite.  What comes next, the fight to land the fish, was satisfying in other ways.  Winning new business has the same stages – you attract, you engage and you land.

Video Film Production awards

Another significant milestone was winning an IOV award – funny enough for the film that I produced for Supadance which was the aforementioned first video production commission. Having been involved in organising these awards in previous years, and witnessing how much the award winners appreciated and benefited from the accolade, to be amongst the winners in my first year of business was amazing.  To add even more gloss to this I also picked up second place in the Documentary category for my Bees & Wasps short film.

IOV Award Winning Film - Best Open 2012
Left – IOV Awards Presenter, Philip Hilton – Right – IOV Executive Member, John De Rienzo

Throughout the year I’ve been shooting a film on the work of Eiger Safety, a rope access company who specialise in installing and testing a whole range of height safety systems. You’ll get a better picture of Eiger Safety, the original brief and the musical short video production from my previous blog here.  I’m also working on a longer-form interview based documentary about them at the moment too.  To convince the client that this was a good idea I shot a proof-of-concept interview with the MD and roughly cut it together for them. We’re going to shoot this for real soon but the proof version worked well and demonstrated the need.  It’s not publicly available, but as you’re interested you can see it here – using the password ‘ginger’.

Another year in video film production

There’s no sign of things slowing up for me at the moment. Right now I’m in the middle of two films – one for a commercial investigation company (Robertson & Co – which is still in the shooting stage) and another for BT Global.  The work for BT is ongoing, and so far I’ve been involved in three films for various divisions within BT Global.  I’ll be writing a longer blog about this work next week so keep your eyes open.

So, all in all a brilliant first year back in video production. I can’t help feeling that I should have done this years ago. My only regret is that I should have put a reminder in my Google calendar to celebrate my first year. Not a bad regret I guess?

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