Standing for Children

Blogs are tough. When you first start you write on them every other day. You check back often to see how many people have read it, and you think about your next blog regularly. Eventually that every other day turns into once a week, then bi-weekly, monthly. Soon you turn around and it's been months since your last blog. The longer you go without, the more of an obstacle it seems to be. But eventually you get back in to it. You commit yourself to write, every other day, just to start the whole process again. But for those of you that do come back to the blog. For those that are interested in what we are doing. We appreciate you, and we do this for you. So ON TO THE BLOG!

Stand for Children is done!

If you haven't heard, we did a series of documentaries for the local chapter of the non-profit organization Stand For Children. These people are advocates for children across the country. Besides organizing protests, letter writing and phone campaigns to lobby for more school funding, they also provide underprivileged youth with the opportunity to go to college through their "beat the odds" scholarship. This is a scholarship that provides much needed assistance to kids with few other options to attend higher education.

This year we were fortunate enough to work with Stand For Children on their videos of the winners of the scholarships. These were all shot by us, driving across the state over a whirlwind weekend of production in Portland, Albany, and Medford, Oregon. While preparing for our Sasquatch screening we began cutting on Stand. We finished our rough cut soon after the screening and a few back and forths between us and Stand For Children's staff, and we had the spots finished and polished ahead of schedule. The videos were shown at Stand for Children's annual fundraiser held this year in the Oregon Zoo ballroom. It was quite an event with a delicious entree, wine, coffee, and desert!

Here are the three videos of the scholarship winners:

Produced by: Kyle Glenn, Walker Williamson

Directed by: Eli Shell

Shot by: Patrick LaValley, Jason Windsor

Sound by: Kyle Glenn

Edited by: Kyle Glenn, Eli Shell

Visual FX: Jason Windsor

This has truly been a positive experience for me personally (Eli here). As we have worked primarily in fiction it was nice to stretch ourselves creatively, try something a little different. Aside from that it is also nice to do something for others. We all took minimal pay, donating more than half of our time to this worthy cause. The better the video ended up, the thought was, the more that Stand For Children could raise at their fundraiser where this would play. We all put alot of time and effort into making these the best they could possibly be. It has been an extremely rewarding experience, and the end product turned out better than I could have hoped. All of us over here at QO look forward to working with Stand for Children again.