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!
Promotional Vignettes
Hamilton is a city in the midst of renaissance. Nowhere is that more apparent than the downtown core, where new businesses are emerging at a breakneck pace. A new company cracks open its doors seemingly every single day.
At Double Barrel, we live and work downtown too. So when the International Village Business Improvement Area asked us to help tell their story, we jumped at the chance.
Our challenge was substantial. First: to showcase the changing face of the downtown core. Second: to spur interest and get people excited to pop downtown to shop.
Essentially, we wanted to get people out of their comfort zone and into these blossoming boutiques. Old habits die hard, and with so much going on for all of us on the daily, it’s just too easy to pass these new stores by. We admire the frontages but never actually venture inside, choosing instead to zip up to the cozy confines of our closest shopping mall.
Through the creation of 1:30 second vignettes, each one focusing on a different shop and story – we helped the International Village BIA show the greater public that the tapestry of the downtown core is changing. Every single entrepreneur has a story of their own to share, and a reason why for them – right now – downtown #HamOnt is the absolute best place to be.
Thanks to Susie Braithwaite and the International Village for inviting us to explore!
Program Overview
Commercial Trailer
Today’s engineering graduates have a tough job ahead of them. From water quality to sustainable living, from climate change to aging infrastructure, the engineering classes of 2015 and beyond will be expected to have the skills necessary to tackle the grand challenges of tomorrow.
The W Booth School of Engineering Practice provides recent grads with that skill set, through interdisciplinary education combined with experiential learning and mentorship. Their tagline: “Inspiring innovative leaders who will transform the world.”
No small task.
When the W Booth School came to us for help with their new commercial, we were excited to get involved. Double Barrel has a long history with McMaster’s Engineering department, but we hadn’t had the opportunity to work with the Master’s program. We knew that this would be a particularly tricky project – within a tight timeframe, showcase the depth and breadth of experiences and opportunities a W Booth graduate would attain.
After much discussion, we decided to go with a combination of green screen, animation and live action in-the-field footage.
After one particularly long shoot day with an amazing team of W Booth Graduates, our animator Taylor Heres set to work in the edit suite. Sketching, animating and keying out the green under the guidance of director Tyler Tekatch. We couldn’t be happier with the end result.
Many thanks to the W Booth School for involving us in such a great project!
Organization Overview
There’s something so special about telling the story of a team that really goes out of its way to care for people. There’s a genuineness, a depth of character that the camera seems to magnify.. and it’s always a beautiful thing.
At Double Barrel, we’ve been lucky to create content for a variety of healthcare organizations. In all honesty, its one of our favourite industries to work with.
We met the Hamilton Family Health Team in the middle of May. They were in need of a mandate-driven video – one that would set the tone for a series of visioning exercises at this year’s AGM.
Under tight timelines we dove quickly into the project, filming at numerous locations around the city to showcase the breadth of the Health Team’s work. From mental health running groups for teenagers to cooking classes for diabetics, to film therapy classes for the general public. We documented as much as we could in the few days that we had, knowing that it would be impossible to show every facet of the impact the Hamilton Family Health Team has on our community.
Ultimately, this piece hit its mark, showcasing the diversity of approach and the warmth of the organization. It’s a video that everyone is wonderfully proud of – and from what we hear – went off smashingly at the AGM!
Thanks so much to the team at HFHT for allowing us to peek behind the curtain, it was our pleasure to shed some light on your fantastic organization.
Commercial Trailer
For the past few months, Double Barrel has been working alongside the DeGroote School of Business – McMaster University, helping them add some video to their fantastic new brand campaign, ‘Education With Purpose.’
Our resulting piece ~ this 1:40 cinematic trailer ~ premiered at their Accolades event last week in Toronto, before an audience of distinguished partners and alumni.
Shot by Tyler Tekatch, music composed by Sasha Szlafarski, script by Kitestring’s Holly Gibson, edited by Taylor Heres, audio mixing & mastering by Hive Studios, cameo by Kristel Bulthuis. Proof that it really does take a village to make something great.
Thanks everyone!
Program Overview
In 2011, 747,000 Canadians were living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias – that’s 14.9 per cent of Canadians 65 and older. Which means that sadly, chances are high that you know someone who has suffered, or is currently suffering from these diseases.
As our population ages, these numbers are only climbing. The Alzheimer’s Society of Canada has estimated that if nothing changes by 2031, this figure will increase to 1.4 million.
In Canada, AGE Inc. has set out to provide humanistic, patient-centred care for people living with dementia. Their curriculum, GPA or Gentle Persuasive Approaches, provides a broad-based educational experience for caregivers treating people afflicted with dementias, allowing these front-line workers to truly connect with the person beneath the disease. It is a novel approach, and one that has had huge success within Canada.
For the 10-year anniversary of the AGE curriculum, the team asked us to create a mini-documentary about the program. We were so pleased to be a part of the celebration for such an important organization. And by the end of our video screening, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
To the staff at AGE Inc. ~ thank you for including us! We were so happy to tell your story. Here’s to another 10 years of success!
