By Wyndham Wise
W
e keep growing because we provide first-rate customer services and people enjoy working with us and we have an amazing team,” Image Media Farm founder and president Roger Williams told Canadian Cinematographer over the phone from Vancouver. “Image Pacific Communications was the original company, then we created Image Central in Toronto about 5 or 6 years ago. In 2009 we branded the company nationally because we were operating as two distinct companies. Now we’re in the middle of redesigning our website. I wanted to bring the company together nationally, and it’s working out really well.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s,” Williams said, “I worked as a recording engineer in Edmonton. I went to do a bit of work with ITV in the days it was producing SCTV. I helped fill in once in a while then I went back to school and learned more about television and came out as camera guy. I started with sports and news and moved on to DOP on a great many documentaries in the 1990s with Discovery, CTV, TSN and a whole host of international networks, always freelance.
At 2010 TIFF, Image Media Farm was involved in numerous behind-the-scenes endeavors. In the capacity for which it has long been acknowledged as an industry leader, IMF provided services for the promotion of key feature films, producing press junkets for all Alliance releases premiering at the festival. IMF’s contribution to supporting international publicity efforts at TIFF, included junket coverage for The Black Swan, The King’s Speech, Waiting for Superman, FUBAR II and Route 132, all of which used camera packages supplied through IMF. “On our busiest day we had a total of 25 cameras rolling at once in various locations and hotel rooms around Toronto,” Williams said. While on location in Ontario, Williams shot 3D coverage of Niagara Falls as part of an impressive, cross-Canada documentary/promotional production for the Canadian Tourism Commission. “We rode The Maid of the Mist and put the camera on a 50-foot Techno-crane,” he said. In addition to its production services, IMF is expanding its reach into independent production with Chinatown, Canada, a recently completed four-part documentary series airing on Omni Television, and The Lodge, a 10-part reality series for World Fishing Network.
“As a freelancer I started my own company, which was Image Pacific Communications in Vancouver in 1990. I started with one camera, and now we have about 60. When you buy one camera, you then need another, and then a client wants something different. Technology changes. I started with broadcast cameras. I have another company in Vancouver called Inspired Cinema Camera Rentals for film rentals. Image Media Farm is strictly for broadcast.” It was for many good reasons that the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games selected IMF as the official chronicler of the 2010 Winter Olympic Torch Relay. Over the course of the 106-day, 45,000kilometre journey of the Olympic flame, IMF’s travelling production team shot over 60,000 digital still photographs and over 800 hours of HD video to fully document the longest Torch Relay ever staged within a single country, in the process recording the participation of over 12,000 Canadian Torchbearers. The journey ended on February 12 in Vancouver, when the Olympic Cauldron was ignited to signal the start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Editors in IMF’s mobile post-production studio, a specially customized motorhome equipped with digital photography processing station and two complete video editing suites, worked continuously, culling daily digital photo highlights and postproducing daily regional relay video highlight packages, six weekly video torch featurettes and daily B-roll footage. To insure that the relay was chronicled every step of the way Williams installed a robotic HD video camera to shoot continuously.
Image courtesy of Image Media Farm.
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WHAT’S NEW
Image Media Farm Re-Brands
Image Media Farm founder and president, Roger Williams, on location at Niagara Falls, for a 3D shoot for the Canadian Tourism Commission.
Canadian Cinematographer - April 2011 •
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