This is a project I began back in April when I went to Vancouver to interview the MacDonald family and a couple of experts on Romanian adoptees. It’s now 2009 and 5 tapes later I’m still working on it.

The first video is an introduction/history lesson on the situation that my sister came from in Romania. It still needs a lot of work and probably a bit more time to breathe as well. Check it out.

The second video is a first draft of the first chapter of Mirela’s story. It’s told through the eyes of Dawn Kinney, mine and Mirela’s mother and the person who went to Romania and got her.

This is a very personal project but there’s always the danger of getting too close. Any commentary, feedback or criticism is welcome and indeed needed.

I only actually got my shit together and entered the Western Clip Contest three times but still it’s nice to see your work recognized by your peers. However the results were posted Nov. 25, over 5 weeks ago. Whoops. Here’s the clip

Caption - Brandon MacArthur leaves the ring after losing by third round TKO to Andrew Buckland in mixed martial arts action in Venom At The Snakepit at Foothills Stadium the night of Aug. 29, 2008.

This was one of the more brutal finishes I’ve seen live in mixed martial arts. Despite the damage it wasn’t a strike to his face that stopped the fight. Our unfortunate hero was pinned on his stomach and his opponent had free rein to pummel his kidneys.

Still this guy put up a hell of a fight and extremely slick on the ground. He almost had his opponent in a couple of submissions.

It was around 2 pm and a very overcast day. The world’s largest softbox combined with the snow on the ground created this beautiful soft, wraparound light you see. I also shot it wide open with my 50mm f1.4.

While I am joking around in the post title. My dad really is a hero. He’s been a tremendous father to me and my 5 other siblings. Yes, that’s right, 5 other siblings. He always committed to being home and making dinner practically every night. Calgary is such a career town and so many families have been sacrificed that I feel very privileged to have the father I have.

He also paid for all my school. Good on ya Dad.

To check it out, click on the resume link in the all important links category to your left.

My partner and I had logged and captured our video before most people and because of this we were chosen for an experiment. They split us up and we would produce our videos separately, with different members of the faculty helping us out. I was lucky enough to get Richard Koci-Hernandez of MultimediaShooter.com fame. It was great to get 3-4 hours of being able to sit next to him and view and understand his creative process. 

To see the other video click here,  It was put together by Nick Iwanyshyn and Brent Foster, formerly of the LA Times. It’s interesting to see the two different takes we got, yet some of the similarities are uncanny. We both used music, Nick’s video uses music composed in Garage Band while mine was piped in through tinny speakers in the barn. We both freeze-framed the mom kissing her daughter and we both used the Santa isolation shot and the shot of the Christmas tree farm framed through the barn. 

While I feel we came away with some strong pictures the story, such as it was, was fairly light stuff. Nick pretty much completely abandoned even the slightly newsy take that I took. His video was fairly weird.   

It’s exciting to be a part of creating this new form of visual journalism. We’re making up the rules as we go along and while not everything that I or my compadres put together is necessarily anything special, it’s all a learning process into transforming all of us into multimedia visual journalists. 

To see all the videos, click here. My top 3 are 

1. The Reverend
2. Gluttony
3. The Spice of Life

This new position is for a multidisciplined and flexible multimedia journalist who can generate and execute multimedia ideas. Ideal candidates will be able to hit the ground running and juggle all types of content and content mediums on deadline assignments. One day you’ll be shooting breaking news photos and transmitting live from the scene, the next day creating a Soundslide feature on a local music festival, the next day shooting video of a political rally for the presidential election.

This position works for the web department and will be focused on quick turn assignments for the web as well as engaging feature assignments that are web-only. Video and audio gear provided, some still equipment provided but the focus of this internship is multimedia. This 13-week, paid internship has a flexible start date (ideally sometime in September) and college credit is available.

Mandatory skills:
+ iMovie or Final Cut Pro
+ Audacity (or other multi-track audio editing programs)
+ Soundslides
+ Photo, video and audio content gathering and editing skills
+ FTP and remote transmission skills
+ Ability to turn high-quality projects quickly
+ Ability to write cleanly and create engaging, informative blog entries, captions, web teases and headlines

I’m aware that I’m only feeding the legendary Canadian inferiority complex but isn’t it odd that there that I can’t list one worthwhile online property from Canada?

Canoe is a terrible walled garden and a huge sprawling redundant eyesore of a site. Canada.com is even worse.

And while you kind of expect the mainstream media in Canada to drop the ball where are the entrepreneurs? The starts ups? I want to be wrong, if you know of a great Canadian site that I should be visiting every day drop a line in the comments or hit me up on Twitter.

Had a half day yesterday shooting product on white for Wag Magazine. It’s great to be in the studio and exercising my brain after a couple weeks of stage work. 

Amidst the work I had a chance to snap this Gingerbread squeaky toy.

However, the two times I have tried to sign up to Twitter the website has been down. Not cool.

Also, here’s a super funny video about the website being down.

EDIT - Twitter is up and running and I am on it. I am enthusiastically following about 20 people right now. Here is a great tutorial for getting started on Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter here http://twitter.com/DuncanKinney

Canwest just released their quarterly results and while I can’t explain the niceties of writing down goodwill and broadcast licenses, this can’t be good. 

Canwest Global Communications Corp posted a C$1 billion ($820 million) quarterly loss on Friday as it wrote down the goodwill and broadcast licenses related to its Canadian conventional television business, sending its shares down 9 percent.

The company said the non-cash writedown of C$1.01 billion reflects a “deterioration” in the near term profit expectations for the TV operations, in part because of the weak advertising market in Canada.

The good thing for Canwest, if there is a good thing, is that they have until 2011 to payback that $3.6 billion dollar debt they picked up when they bought Alliance Atlantis through Goldman Sachs.