MOVERS&SHAKERS
Team players
From two videographers and a new family-run café to a real estate titan,
the secret to success lies in sharing the dream
DOUBLE BARREL STUDIOS
Your business
life in film
A chance meeting over a backyard
fence was enough to convince
filmmakers Roslyn Allen and Lee
Hillman that they should be working together. OK, it was actually
a chance meeting involving two
bottles of Shiraz.
The two had met online at a website frequented by documentary
filmmakers and then met in person
at an exchange event for the Hamilton creative industry. Not long after,
Hillman was in the backyard of his
Hamilton home when he thought he
recognized Allen’s laugh emanating
from the yard next door.
“I looked over and she was drinking wine with my neighbour,” Hillman recalls. “I went over and by the
end of that meeting we’d decided
to share an office.”
At Double Barrel Studios, which
they formally started this past
spring, the dynamic duo are using
their filmmaking skills and love of
documentaries to help companies
augment their web communications.
“A lot of companies now are realizing they need video content for
their websites and that’s created a
huge market for trained broadcast
professionals like us to go in and
create what we look at as brand journalism,” says Allen, whose credits
include winning efforts in both the
Canadian New Media Awards and
Gemini Awards. “When organizations bring us in, we actually create
stories as an extension of corporate
communications to help them get
their word out.”
One of Double Barrel’s first clients
was the McMaster University School
of Engineering, which is in the midst
of a groundbreaking project called
ExCEL (Engineering Centre for Expe22
BIZMAGAZINE.C A
riential Learning). “They asked us to
create a video that would basically
be used to help garner fundraising
support from students and alumni,”
Allen notes. “Wherever the dean of
engineering goes, he would pull
out his laptop and pop in the video
so the audience could see what the
building was all about. It was a way
for them to get across a lot of information in a short period of time and
in an entertaining fashion.”
Their other clients include the
University of Toronto, the DeGroote
School of Business at McMaster, the
Hamilton Chamber of Commerce
and Crush on Niagara Wine Tours.
Corporate communications are
being forced to adapt in an era when
people seem to have increasingly
short attention spans, explains Hillman, who knows something of the
matter, having spent a decade analyzing data for the Neilson Ratings
to learn what people liked to watch
on TV. “If you don’t grab them
right away and keep them engaged,
they’re going to tune out. When people go to a website, the first thing
they’re looking for is a video to tell
them about the company and what
they’re all about. And if they find a
poorly made video it devalues the
whole perception of the company.”
Hillman said he and Allen believe that their complementary
filmmaking skills are helping their
clients create the right videos for
their needs. But, they point out, it
doesn’t end there.
“You can create a video and just
throw it on a YouTube page somewhere and it’s just kind of out there
in cyberspace,” he says. “But one
of the things that we’re doing now
is creating strategies for how to
distribute this content. That’s been
the missing piece of the puzzle.”
GARRY McKAY