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Pangeality Productions Celebrating 3rd Emmy Award Nomination

leonard — Tue, 10 May 2011 01:04:30 +0000

I’m thrilled to announce that a story I did for the Seattle Channel program City Stream has been nominated for an Emmy award in the human interest category. The story is a piece about sustainable fishing in Puget Sound, and profiles friend and client Pete Knutson of Loki Fish. I shot and edited the piece, working together with producer Penny Legate who wrote and voiced the story. Last year I was nominated twice, but unfortunately didn’t bring home the award. Hoping this year will be different. I continue to produce stories for the Seattle Channel, mostly focusing on green and environmental issues. Recent stories include how Safeco and Qwest Fields are composting their food scraps and packaging, teaching organic gardening in public housing at Yesler Terrace, a profile of Sustainable West Seattle, a new housing and commercial development along N. Rainier Ave, and others. Most of these videos can be found on other parts of this site or on our Vimeo channel linked to in the bottom left corner of the front page of this website.

Sustainable Fishing & Environmental Stewardship from Washington to Alaska from Pangeality Productions on Vimeo.

Filming a Ride Along With Seattle Police Lieutenant for Crime Story

leonard — Wed, 04 May 2011 02:24:57 +0000

Last week I spent the day filming for an upcoming Seattle Channel story about more scientific approaches to community policing. The idea involves using very specific data analysis to more effectively appropriate limited resources toward reducing crime. City Council member Tim Burgess’ office was hosting a group of academics from the George Mason University who’ve been analyzing Seattle crime data over a period of time and were in town to present to the city council based on their findings. The morning shoot involved a short round table discussion at the Casey Family Foundation offices at the corner of 23rd and Union, a former Central District ‘hot spot’ that has recently successfully brought down the local crime problem. The round table was followed by a neighborhood tour to 4 local businesses, where the owners spoke briefly to the group about their own individual relationship with the community, and the police, and told their story of how things had progressed and changed over the past few years, from recent implementation of the ‘Drug Market Initiative’ to gentrification’s impact on the neighborhood, and a hand full of other themes. The businesses included a coffee shop, a restaurant, a neighborhood cinema, and another multipurpose business.
The best part of the day was the ride along with Lieutenant Joel Guay. Together with my producer, we cruised the East Precinct, which includes in his words “everything from billionaires who live in Madison Park to indigent crack smokers who live in the area known as the jungle.” The East precinct stretches from St Mark’s Cathedral in N. Capitol Hill to Dearborn Ave. in the south, Lake Washington to the East, i5 to the west, and everything in between. It was a pretty amazing tour, as I sat contorted in the front passenger seat between the dashboard mounted laptop and the window, attempting to get a good profile angle of him as he drove, with the streetscape passing behind him through the window, the outdoor exposure constantly shifting as we cruised and I tried to maintain a solid shot.
That was followed by interviews in the City Council chambers with councilmember Burgess who’s a former police officer, and a former detective and special victim’s unit officer from the Baltimore police who is now a PhD candidate at George Mason involved in doing the research. A great way to spend a day learning about our city from a completely different perspective. Air date is June 2nd on Chanel 21 in Seattle.

New Video: Green Leadership @ Seattle’s Professional Sports Stadiums

leonard — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:23:02 +0000

Fresh off our recently announced 3rd Emmy nomination, I again teamed up with friend and colleague Penny Legate to produce another story for The Seattle Channel program City Stream. In addition to my work with private clients, I continue to freelance with The Seattle Channel as a cameraman and editor, doing stories mainly about sustainability, the environment and overall people and organizations engaged in positive work in our community. Though the pay isn’t great, I enjoy doing work for broadcast and seeing my work on television. This year The Seattle Channel was nominated for overall station excellence and the broad spectrum of programming is a great reflection of the character of our city, far beyond just covering boring city council meetings.

For the last 2 years Cedar Grove Composting has been one of Pangeality Production’s best clients, and when I learned that they were composting all of the food scraps and packaging at the main sports stadiums here, I thought it’d make a great story for City Stream. I was especially impressed by their partnership with Safeco and Qwest Fields, the homes of Seattle’s MLB team the Mariners and NFL team the Seahawks.

Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up

Testdriving the $110,000 All Electric Tesla Roadster in Residential West Seattle

leonard — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 09:47:47 +0000

Leaving a party at the home of legendary photographer Art Wolfe in West Seattle, I assumed the fancy red sports car across the street from my 1992 Honda Accord with 202,000 miles was a Ferrari and belonged to a guest of the party. But it didn’t, and it wasn’t a Ferrari, it was a Tesla Roadster and it belonged to his neighbor Lance who was standing on the sidewalk with his wife and young son. I began asking him some questions about it, not sure why I even knew the name. But as we got into it, I took out my camera to make a video as it turned out he was a Tesla Roadster salesman with all the details. Apparently the car, all electric with a super beautiful body does 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds and is made out of carbon fiber (what they’re using to make new planes with), which according to him is 4 times stronger than steel and 1/4 the weight, and goes 250 miles on one charge. After explaining all of the technology and design elements, we hopped in the car and took it for a spin in the neighborhood on Fauntleroy Ave in residential West Seattle, where Lance proceeded to punch it into hyperspace a few times with it’s insane acceleration. Check out this video tour I made of this incredible car, which at $110,000 (no sales tax as there are no emissions) remains a ridiculously expensive car but according to Lance, this is the forefront of incredible new electric vehicle technology with a goal of introducing non sports car sedans and subcompact lines in the coming years at much lower prices. There are currently 1,300 of the vehicle on the road and roughly 60 in the Pacific Northwest alone.

Pangeality Productions Wins National NATOA Award

leonard — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:26:32 +0000

Via my work with The Seattle Channel, I’ve just learned that we won a NATOA Award, commonly referred to as the Emmys of government television. The Government Programming Awards (GPAs) are annual awards that recognize excellence in broadcast, cable, multimedia and electronic programming produced by local government agencies, in this case The City of Seattle. The piece was the story about Rob Rose and his organization The Rose International Fund for Children and their work on behalf of young people with disabilities in Nepal, and the movement to battle the stigma of disability in Nepal and South Asia. We won’t know until September whether we won the category or not, but the nomination itself is an award as all nominations are given recognition for their work. There will be an awards banquet in Washington D.C. in early October. Very cool.

This is the piece

Challenging The Stigma of Disability in Nepal from Pangeality Productions on Vimeo.

Saving an Iconic Seqouia Tree in Downtown Seattle

leonard — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:03:17 +0000

I got a call late one afternoon recently from my client Cedar Grove Composting to ask me to come film some footage of a special project they were working on. Together with the Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities, Cedar Grove Composting was involved in trying to save a very special tree. The giant Sequoia tree is in the heart of downtown Seattle at the corner of 4th and Stewart, that was originally planted on Aurora Avenue, but was relocated in 1972. The tree is also the official Christmas Tree downtown every year. Over the years, the tree continued to grow but recently, birds had infested it and their droppings were both damaging the soil below as well as the canopy was slowly becoming covering with their acidic poop. Not sure about how to save the tree, SDOT approached international tree specialist James Urban, author of the book Up By Roots who had been in Seattle recently and paid the tree a house call, diagnosing the problem and prescribing the solution that this group eventually implemented.

So using an air spade to blow out vertical holes and a giant sucker truck to take the dirt away, a number of 4 ft deep vertical columns were dug around the base of the tree, and filled with fresh compost donated by Cedar Grove. Better irrigation and gas flow to the roots was the goal to supplement the pruning they’d already done.

Here is the video I produced about the work.

From Aurora Ave N. to Downtown

Sequoia on Aurora before being transplanted, 1972

Placing the tree downtown at 4th and Stewart, Seattle

Article in Nepali newspapers ‘Republica’ & Kathmandu Post about our Emmy Nominated video

leonard — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:45:20 +0000

Click on the image below to read the article