Stories
News, project launches and thoughts from our team.
Employer Stories
Living Wage Hamilton is an organization that advocates to employers and helps to raise awareness about the importance of providing a living wage; a wage that provides enough for employees to cover basic every-day expenses. The challenge for Living Wage Hamilton is to offset the perceived financial challenge for businesses with the benefits that they will derive from adopting a living wage policy.
To help businesses better understand those benefits, Living Wage Hamilton contracted Double Barrel Studios to produce a short series of videos highlighting local Living Wage employers.
The videos feature Living Wage Hamilton employers such as Cake & Loaf Bakery, The Mustard Seed Co-op & provided us with an opportunity to contribute our own experience at Double Barrel Studios as a living wage employer.
For creative professions, wages often fall below the living wage threshold and that sometimes means finding additional work outside of the field to make ends meet. For Double Barrel Studios offering a living wage allows for our busy team of directors, producers, editors and writers to dedicate 100% of their efforts into providing the best experience when we work with our clients.
We already recognized the importance of providing a Living Wage & just like the other employers that we interviewed we also feel that it plays a vital role in the long term success of a company. It was a new experience for us having to be the interviewee’s but we were honoured to have the chance to speak about something that we feel is an important cause for our great city!
Visit https://livingwagehamilton.ca/ & join the conversation!
Original Educational Series
For people who have recently been diagnosed with cancer, one of the first challenges is overcoming the amount of information that exists when it comes to care and treatment options. In the digital age, opinions are everywhere, and sorting through them to discover which are accurate and which are bunk can be an overwhelming task.
At Double Barrel, we’ve all lost loved ones to cancer. So when Wayne MacPhail of the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer approached us with an innovative way of educating patients about how to separate the wheat from the chaff we were thrilled.
This was a unique project as Wayne came to us with concept in hand. CPAC wanted to create an online educational series that was dramatic, comedic – and demanding. In fact, the entire piece depended on a pitch-perfect embodiment of our two leads, Franny & Zooey, two 12-year-old budding scientists. Knowing that we needed rock-solid talent, we decided to reach out to ACTRA. For web series this can seem daunting, but their fantastic industry liasons walked us through the process effortlessly. Our two actresses – Chelsea Okyere and Zoe McGarry came in prepared and ready, doing such an amazing job in the audition that we ended up using their second rehearsal take in the completed video.
The final piece is everything we had hoped to achieve, and definitely goes into the Double Barrel vault as one of the most original concepts we’ve executed. Says MacPhail, “It was a pleasure (as always) working with Double Barrel on this project. From our first conversation about the unusual concept they got it and brought a ton of creative value to the end product. This is the type of idea, as we said in the meetings “that had a hundred ways to fail”. But, through casting, direction, animation and post-production, they didn’t let any of them happen. The result is delightful.”
We’re excited to see where this goes. Thanks for inviting us along, Wayne!
