September Ongoings

Chance x The Colorado Trust: Blackpackers

Back in June we wrote about our work with The Colorado Trust on a video story about the group Blackpackers and the impact they’re making on the community. See the full video below!

Chance x The Colorado Trust: Young Farmers

The current population of farmers is aging out and the next generation is not adequately replacing them. Because unused agricultural land often gets sold to developers, this loss impacts plant life, soil health and our local food systems. We’ve been following Reiden and Dennis, two young farmers in Colorado who are in the midst of navigating an agricultural system that has many barriers to entry, including access to land, water rights, infrastructure and funding. They’ve both found support, however, through formal programming. The existence of farming incubator programs and the Northern Colorado Foodshed Project’s Farm Accelerator Business Program have helped them navigate their first few years in the industry. Incubator programs and accelerator business programs help break down the aforementioned barriers to entry and aim to provide new farmers with the support needed to succeed in the agricultural field long term.  Full video coming soon!

What's New in July

Welcome! These are some projects we have been excited to work on the last few months.

Gensler Internal Parody Video with Rambler Creative

We had so much fun collaborating with Ramble Creative to produce a parody music video of the 80s hit “Eye of the Tiger” for Gensler, who provide architectural, design and consulting services across North America. They wanted to create a fun, internal media piece featuring their staff to premiere at an event.  Gensler staff chose the track, and outfitted themselves in 80s/tiger-related gear, while Ramble worked on the creative development and storyboarding parody scenes from the original video. The staff lip-synced their scenes which provided for a hilarious reel of outtakes. We shot in 4:3 aspect ratio to give the 80s vibe and added some creative filters in post to give that old school 80s look.

Denver Streets Partnership

An e-bike initiative is transforming how small businesses around Denver do their work, and we got to tell the stories of several beneficiaries of this amazing program. Denver Streets Partnership, alongside Bicycle Colorado, received a grant from the City of Denver’s Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency office that enables them to provide e-bikes and training to a handful of businesses in Denver to use for their business deliveries. Not only are businesses saving money but it’s bringing a renewed delight into the delivery and transportation aspect of their work. Check out what everyone has to say about the program below!

Lucid Diagnostics

You couldn’t ask for a more idyllic place to play a round of golf than in Idaho’s Snake River Canyon.  To that end, we flew out to meet and follow Scott–an outdoors enthusiast–around said golf course for a day and captured his story about using Lucid Diagnostics’ EsoGuard Test to detect early stages of cancer. He was diagnosed with Barrett’s Esophagus, a precancerous condition of the esophagus. The diagnosis happened early enough that Scott avoided surgery and major procedures. He’s well on his way in the recovery process and is thankful to be able to continue to connect with family, friends and to show up for his regular tee times. Check out his full story below!

Capturing Video Stories Over Time

This year we wrapped up a three-year video project with The Colorado Health Foundation, and we've been reflecting on the experiences we had in different communities. 

We were tasked with capturing a three-year grant process in three different communities - Westwood, Lamar and Arvada - getting to know each one and watching them grow into more abundant, stronger, physically active and healthy neighborhoods. We captured the growth in each place from the very first meeting to the last, following the key community leaders as they gathered around their neighbors and made decisions about what would make their community healthier, including implementing new parks, sidewalks, bike trails, neighborhood gatherings and youth sports programs.

The result was one video per community per year highlighting the different themes of the year and stories of communities leaders who had grown throughout the process. We are so lucky to have been the chosen video producers for the project, and we grew with each community along the way, as we were in active conversations with each place and captured their greatest milestones in a long, rewarding process. 

It takes a different approach to work on such a fluid video project, over a long period of time. It took a lot of relationship maintenance, changes of plans, reassessment of communications goals, and creativity in translating what had happened in each community over the three years. We enjoy having a window into the intense work and dedication of grassroots activism and the strength communities have when they learn to work together. We were continuously inspired as we developed new and interesting ways to capture their progress, and we built relationships with people that we enjoyed getting the chance to interview over the years. 

These are the kinds of projects we like to go after - ones where we can dive deeply into a community project or process with people that are doing very important work on the ground. If we can develop beautiful videos around such movements and distribute them widely, we believe we can expand people's overall circle of concern and encourage people to act in their own lives, while also creating empathy and understand for those communities and folks they may not interact with every day. 

Check out the videos for each community below!

Healthy Places Lamar

Healthy Places Westwood

Healthy Places Arvada

Living with the Dead at the Intendence Film Festival

Greetings! Our documentary Living With the Dead has been chosen to screen at the Intendence Film Festival the last week of June. We are excited and honored!

Living with the Dead is one of 13 films to be chosen from Colorado and 26 chosen from other states and countries. IFF's mission is to provide an inclusive film event that features the world-class talents of the Colorado film industry, while acknowledging good filmmaking wherever it originates. The festival also encourages and recognizes emerging young filmmakers. We are so happy to get Living With the Dead back out there for another screening.

Living With the Dead was our first feature-length documentary film researched and shot over a period of five years in Manila, Philippines. Manila is the most densely populated city in the world with an average of 43,000 people living per square kilometer. In the center of this heaving metropolis lies the North Cemetery which is home to a living community of more than 2,000 people. In a country where around 40 percent of people live below the poverty line, and population in Manila is reaching desperate proportions, the cemetery provides a unique residence for the hundreds of families that live and work within its walls. Our documentary explores the lives and dreams of several cemetery residents as well as the socioeconomic and political issues that brought them there.

We can’t wait to see what other incredible documentaries have been chosen to screen at the festival. There are so many stories that need to be told!

The Intendence Film Festival (IFF) will be screening films from Colorado and the rest of the world on Thursday, June 25, through Saturday, June 27, 2015, at the Open Media Foundation. Check out more information about the fest and film lineup at their Facebook page.

Documentary: Living with the Dead (trailer) from Chance Multimedia on Vimeo.

A Visit from Colorado Academy

Greetings! Yesterday we had a group of bright, young aspiring journalists, storytellers and filmmakers into our offices to give them a tour of the facilities and teach them the ways of a small documentary production company. They had been traveling to news stations and large networks, so Chance Multimedia was quite a different animal for them to see. We hope we were as inspiring to them as they were to us. It's an interesting thing to build a company from the ground up, then finally get to a place where others who are aspiring to be professionals are actually consulting you for advice. In what sometimes feels like a chaotic juggle of projects, timelines and budgets, it's nice to be able to simply and confidently answer the questions of curious, young people. We like being mentors, and we love seeing uninhibited passion. That passion is what drives great work.

So thank you, Colorado Academy students. You are welcome back anytime!

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