The House-Hasson video is done!
The good news? The company told me they were thrilled with it, and it matched their vision completely. The bad? Well, have you ever finished a project where all you can see are the flaws? That's often the case for me, and it certainly holds true here. Now that I've been playing around more with Adobe After Effects, I think I can produce something much better if I sat down and started over. And looking back, I would have preferred to shoot all the video myself instead of relying on some the company had previously shot, but time and budget constraints dictated otherwise, as they often do. But enough nitpicking. The client was happy and incredibly easy to work with so that's all that really matters!
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I'm thrilled for the chance to edit the corporate video for House Hasson Hardware Co. This Knoxville-based company is America's largest independent regional hardware distributor.
How did I get the lucky chance to work with them? I'm still wondering that myself. It's actually an opportunity that came as a result of the United Way campaign video I edited a few months ago. House-Hasson was one of the companies featured. After one of their employees saw that video, they pitched my name to House-Hasson's marketing manager Taylor Hasson, who is the son of CEO Don Hasson. Don Hasson is also the third member of the Hasson family to run the company since it was founded way back in 1906, and he's helped it grow into a company that serves more than 2,500 hardware stores and lumber yards in 18 states, the Caribbean and South America. So obviously, they're not small potatoes, but all the friendly folks at House-Hasson made the two-day shoot at their headquarters such a pleasurable experience! I hope to post the video soon when it's complete. I had the pleasure of shooting the Smoky Mountain Air Show as part of WBIR's ambitious five-hour live broadcast.
This was a big deal in the Knoxville, TN area because budget cuts and 9/11 prevented the event from being held here for the last 16 years. Even though I had to stay in one place to shoot, here are some of the highlights I recorded, finishing with the famous Blue Angels. I had a truly rewarding experience last month shooting a video in beautiful Townsend, TN. If you want to see the Smoky Mountains, but don't want the touristy and more commercial experience offered by places like Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, then Townsend is a must!
Anyway, I was hired to shoot a video for the guild of the Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center, which is trying to raise money to help kids take field trips there. The GSMHC gives kids a hands-on experience of what life was like in the Smoky Mountains during the pioneers' times. Leigh Wilson from the guild was incredibly helpful setting this shoot up for me, and hearing stories about life in Townsend only made me and my wife want to retire there. I'm just putting the final touches on the video, which will be shown at the guild's fundraising gala on May 21. I agreed not to post it until then, but everyone at the GSMHC seems pleased with it. The phrase "It's all about who you know" applies constantly in the working world, and that's certainly been the case for me in the freelance world.
Shortly after dipping my toes in the freelance pool, I got a Facebook message from an old Mizzou Journalism School friend: Rebecca Gegg. We hadn't corresponded much since college, but we always got along. Well, I must have made an impression shooting standups and live shots for her 12-13 years ago because when she needed to hire a freelance photog for a shoot in Asheville, Rebecca talked me up big to her co-workers at Cerner. I had not heard of Cerner before, but it turns out, it's a Fortune 500 company based out of Kansas City that specializes is health care technology. For this shoot, Cerner wanted to show the new camera technology they developed to help reduce patient falls in hospitals. Mission Health in Asheville has been using these cameras, and so far, the results are positive. Big time stuff. So the pressure was on for me to shoot well for them. In the end, Rebecca and I had a fun time. Despite a few HIPAA roadblocks to getting better b-roll, I thought we did the best we could do (except for the way I shot one interview). The good folks at Cerner did the editing and posted the final video this week, and it turned out well. Check it out! I got the final thumbs up from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of East Tennessee on the video they asked me to produce for them. This one turned out a little better than I originally expected, and I learned so much about CF in the process. Special thanks to both the foundation and the Hembree family for giving us a look at how sweet 3-year-old Shealie deals with cystic fibrosis every day. It's a lot more than I ever thought. Anyway, take a look! I had a GREAT few days in Asheville shooting video for Cerner Corporation at the Mission Health hospitals.
Cerner is an innovative Fortune 500 company based out of Kansas City that specializes in health care technology. Recently, Cerner created a system where hospitals can monitor patients recovering from neurosurgery using, of all things, Xbox cameras. Mission Health is the first hospital to use these cameras, and as a result, their patients' "falls" (like falling out of bed, etc) have dropped dramatically! Cool stuff. Thanks to my old Mizzou pal and Cerner employee Rebecca Gegg for hooking me up with the shoot! DayNine Consulting had a busy Friday to christen their new Nashville offices. Before their open house, they assembled ten bicycles for charity…and raced them around the office.
Thanks to DayNine for hiring me to shoot the event! Next week, I'll be editing promo videos for them from what I shot. I'm really enjoying the opportunity to tell the story of Shealie Rain, who is three years old and was born with cystic fibrosis.
Seeing what she and her single mom, Samantha, have to go through everyday with medications and treatments is both heartbreaking and inspirational. Shealie has to take 20-30 pills a day, and her 30-minute-long daily vest treatment (which are needed to clear mucus from her lungs) are absolutely no fun. I've certainly learned a lot this week about CF and how it effects 30,000 Americans. Stay tuned next week for the promotional video I'll be producing on it. And hanks to the East TN chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for hiring me! It was the summer before I transferred to the University of Missouri after attending a year at North Carolina State. My dad (Jay Jennings) and I were about to embark on a week-long road trip to the northeast, one last father-son trek before I moved out of state for the first time. We had a lot of the trip pretty well mapped out: our first game at Fenway Park, trips to the baseball and basketball halls of fame, etc. A few days before we left, Dad contacted Stuart Scott. As many of you know, Stuart worked at WRAL with Dad, who has been a photographer at the station since 1980. What you may not know (and Dad would be too humble to mention) was how big a fan Stuart always was of Dad’s. Every time I saw Stuart, he would always ask about Dad and say how Dad’s photoessays inspired him to get into the business. After Stuart left WRAL for WESH in Orlando, we visited the station and popped by an edit bay where Stuart was anxious to get Dad’s feedback on some of his recent work. In an ESPN the Magazine interview years later, he even named Dad and the members of the WRAL sports department as his earliest TV heroes. But back to 2001. Dad emailed Stuart to see if we would be able to see ESPN during our trip because we would be nearby. We thought, at best, he would give us a quick 30-minute tour of the offices and studio and send us on our way. That would have been plenty. More than plenty. Instead, Stuart told us to show up at a certain time. Probably around 3:30-4pm. He greeted us in the lobby after his workout (Stuart? Working out? Shocker.), and took us to his office. Little did we realize Stuart was going to let us hang out with him for his entire shift!!! It started with meet-and-greets with every single person who dropped by his office (And he had lots of visitors. Another shocker.). Then we popped into some offices with a few of his fellow anchors. When stopping to see Linda Cohn, who’s always easy to make laugh, Stuart opened her door and just did a face-first pratfall as a “hello.” Obviously, he was gushing about Dad to the people we met. When he introduced me, he couldn’t wait to share an anecdote I told him shortly after we arrived that day. Yes, I used to hate UNC. And of course, no one openly bled light blue like Stuart. To let him know where I was coming from, I told Stuart that when I was coming out of high school, I applied to Carolina. Not so I could get in. Quite the opposite. I didn’t want anyone from UNC to tell me I went to NC State just because I couldn’t get in to Carolina. So I applied to UNC just so I could get in, and turn them down! Well, I got accepted to UNC, turned them down, went to State, and relayed this shallow but true tale to Stuart. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Man, that is cold!” he said. Then, whether it was Linda Cohn or Dan Patrick, or a product assistant just interning for the summer, Stuart introduced me, “And this is Jay’s son Jason. Get this! He applied to Carolina, just so he could turn them down!” He was such a good sport. Stuart also took us by the ESPN Radio studios where Bob Stevens was on the air. In typical Stuart fashion, he barged in, was greeted delightfully by Bob, said a couple things into the mic and left. Just a surprise cameo for our, and the listeners’, entertainment. Later, we followed Stuart to the ESPN dining room made famous from all the This Is Sportscenter commercials. He got dinner. I grabbed an apple, didn’t realize until he got to the register that you had to pay, so I pocketed the apple for some reason. We got back to Stuart’s office. He was doing the 11pm show with Dan Patrick (my on air idol at the time). Stuart opened the rundown. “Oh man, I’ve got wear pants tonight!” he bemoaned. Back in the old Sportscenter days, anchors rarely had to stand and be shot head-to-toe. Unfortunately for Stuart, this was one of those nights. He couldn’t wear jeans or shorts and just stay behind the desk. Then, he started to write, and something happened for which I was far from prepared. Stuart spouted out, “Jason, what should I write about this Keyshawn Johnson story?” “Ummm, uuhh, ummm…,” I stuttered, quickly realizing what was happening. Stuart Scott—one of the most prominent faces on the network—was going to let me write an intro for him?!? This was an incredible (and possibly risky) gesture. But because he knew I was interested in getting into the TV business, he found opportunities to let me get a taste of it. Unreal. Now, to this day, I have trouble writing in someone’s voice other than my own. Writing for Stuart? The most unique voice in the history of ESPN? I was on the Budweiser hot seat. Luckily, Dad is a better writer than me, so it really became a three-man think tank where Stuart added his typical Stuart Scott sizzle. We wrote a story on Keyshawn Johnson getting pissy at Bucs training camp, an intro to a Tim Kurkjian package on Dave Winfield going into the Hall of Fame, and maybe another story or two. Show time was approaching. Stuart headed down to makeup. Surprise surprise, he treated the makeup lady like family. Meanwhile, I stood slack-jawed in the newsroom in awe of Dan Patrick while he and Trey Wingo talked about how they couldn’t go back and do local sports like their old colleague Larry Biel had recently done. Then, we made the walk down that iconic long hallway to the studio: me, Dad, Stuart Scott and Dan Patrick. I didn’t say a word. What could I add to this conversation? Having been back to ESPN one time since, I’m pretty sure post-9/11, you can’t have visitors in the studio during show time. But this was six weeks before the towers fell, so we walked right in. Stuart told us to sit at a desk off to the side where interviews were taped. Baseball Tonight was just wrapping up and was in its final commercial break. At the time, both shows shared the studio at different desks. It was trade deadline day so BBTN’s A-team was on the set: Karl Ravech, Peter Gammons and Harold Reynolds. I probably watched BBTN more than Sportscenter during this era, so imagine my thrill when Stuart yelled, “Hey guys, say ‘hello’ to Jay and Jason from North Carolina!” “Hey, Jay and Jason from North Carolina!” they all immediately replied. Finally, Sportscenter started. There was Patrick, calling baseball highlights and giving that signature smooth, “the whiiiffff”. Then, the Keyshawn story. “He was complaining when they didn’t give him the damn ball. Now, they’ve given him the damn ball, and he’s still complaining…” No one ever said it was award-winning. But there were my words (and four-letter ones, at that!) being read on Sportscenter by Stuart Scott. I couldn’t believe it. During a commercial, he asked Dad and me to come up and take a picture on the set. That picture has been framed at every place I’ve lived ever since I got the film developed. There are other long stories from that day I’ll make shorter: like getting Dan Patrick to sign a copy of his book and meeting John Anderson where he referred to Dad as a Mizzou “legend” (100 percent true). But the day all happened because of Stuart. He gave me a copy of his scripts from the show, autographed it and wrote “Boo-yow!” underneath. Remember, Stuart didn’t say, “Booyah.” Listen to his pronunciation. It’s “BOO-yow.” There was once a time he tried to tell people this, but obviously, it wasn’t worth the argument. Stuart Scott will be remembered for more than Booyah. First and foremost, his legacy will be his battle with cancer and how he approached it with courage while staying his usual positive self for the last seven years of his life. It’s amazing to me that 26 years after first meeting him in Raleigh and 13 years after that day in Bristol, the President of the United States and Michael Jordan would be releasing statements about Stuart’s death. But that also shows what an impact he made in his short time here. Stuart Scott lived life to the fullest, always stayed true to himself, put others first, made everyone around him happier and left a mark on this world. That’s something we all should aspire to do. |
AuthorJason Jennings is a freelance videographer based in Raleigh, NC. He previously spent more than a decade covering sports for television stations in Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Missouri. Archives
December 2018
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