Last week I attended a powerful workshop organized by TSNE – MissionWorks called “Moving Beyond Diversity to Inclusion.” Co-facilitators Stewart Lanier and Trina Jackson offered loads of food for thought, including feedback shared by people of color about white-led institutions:   “There are good intentions but a lack of substance.” As...

Recently, we had the opportunity to collaborate for a second time with CommunicateHealth on a childhood obesity prevention project for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).  AAP wanted a series of videos that teach families how to establish healthy eating habits when their children are at a very young age. The Challenge When we were originally approached to do filming for the project, AAP wanted...

Three Identical Strangers tells how triplet brothers born in New York City in the 1960s were separated at birth, adopted out to three different families, and then how they accidentally discover one another and reunite. The story is an entertaining one. When they find each other in the early 80s, the event became a national sensation, and the brothers enthusiastically embrace all the publicity - newspaper...

 Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS) provides legal counsel to low-income Boston residents. The Family Law Unit within GBLS works with victims of domestic violence, and GBLS wanted a video that told the story of one of these clients for a recent fundraising campaign. The need for sensitivity GBLS identified a former client, Sam, who was willing to share her story. Beyond removing herself from...

  Building nonprofit board diversity presents challenges. Last month, The Boston Foundation hosted its fourth forum on the subject of nonprofit diversity, equity and inclusion. This forum focused on the Leading with Intent report that was published by BoardSource. While the report addresses a wide range of issues related to the functioning of nonprofit boards, the TBF event was mostly examining...

 The mission of Reach Out and Read (ROR) is to incorporate books into pediatric care and encourage families to read together. For our first project with ROR a year ago, we filmed a series of videos with families that had children of different ages, from infants to toddlers. In our most recent project, ROR wanted to do another series but with children with different disabilities, including hearing...

  The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Boston Medical Center wanted to create a series of videos to educate and also inspire families with children born prematurely. One of the NICU doctors was heading up the project on the client side, and, more so than other clients, she relied on us to help her through the preproduction phase of the project. This was because the project carried one or two extra...

A few months back, we had a client who wanted several training videos. The only location they had available to them was in their rather uninspiring conference room, and so no one was particularly enthusiastic about how that was going to look. Their previous videos had been filmed against one of the room's white walls, which had worked reasonably well, but I thought we could give ourselves a little...

The mission of Music & Memory is to bring personalized music into the lives of the elderly and infirm. "Personalized music" is the key element. Plenty of research exists on the general health benefits of music, but Music & Memory focuses on helping this population access music from their past that has personal importance to them. Many individuals suffering from dementia show little engagement...

We were filming at Floating Children's Hospital last weekend, and when we came through the door with all of our gear, one of the doctors said, in so many words, "Holy cow! That's a lot of equipment." Relatively speaking, it actually wasn't all that much, but her response is a common one among folks who haven't experienced video production before.  Throughout the weekend, she also commented...