Swedish American, A Division of UW Health

I served as a Contract Art Director for Pablo Korona Moving Pictures; for commercial video production with SwedishAmerican Health Network, under a marketing contract with its regional ad firm, Heinzeroth.

Pre-production included designing concepts and storyboarding to be used on-set and during post-production. On-set direction was memorable with a great crew, though not a good paying arrangement due to being in the heart of the national recession.

I stood around pretending to move props based on Korona’s directorial vision—for 3 days on location at the Swede’s Charles Street and East State Street entrances—12 hours a day. Korona (director/videographer) and myself not being union could get away with the long days, though my recollection is that of Korona taking over 40 shots for a three-piece strings section of musicians hired that we needed to shoot at night in front of a massive 60 foot abstract colorful backdrop that glowed off of the entrance water pond. Thinking back, how dumb but fun!

We enjoyed the pleasure of working with an over-staffed-and-under-budgeted crew most of the time. Half union, half Rock Valley College students. We were all desperate due to the national recession impacting the Rockford region in drastic economic fashion— and I managed to lead and collaborate with talented kids from the local community college’s video production class: Zach Staas, Matt Youngblood, Bing Liu (Director of the Oscar nominated Minding the Gap) and a few more who kept my self-aggrandizing career pride in check with many laughs.

Staas and I moved prop plants around like it was nobody’s business but ours; and in one case, a 20′ 300lb plastic tree. The highlight of the shoot was relocating large prop plants from different floors of the hospital at the drop of a dime based on Korona’s “vision”—his directives. I assisted the crew with boom mics, hanging background abstracts measuring 60′ high over a newly installed water fountain (mentioned previously) and all of it I would do again.

Korona’s vision was challenging to work with despite its conservative, final, video production results. The greatest achievement of this contract commercial video campaign is that I met my future wife on-set. She being a makeup, stylist, contractor, and SAG actor member for two of the three days. This project serves great memories; we did a good job and had fun despite all of us struggling to survive in the heart of a recession while producing these videos for Swedish American, Pablo Picassorona and Heinzeroth.