There’s a saying, “Teamwork makes the dream work”. Nothing could be closer to the truth than when Recovering Oklahomans After Disaster took on the task to rebuild Carolyn Shockey’s home in Slaughterville. Bewley Productions had the honor to document the project from start to finish.

Carolyn’s home was seriously damaged in a tornado. She described the walls in her mobile home as breathing during the storm. It caused the walls to separate from the frame of the home resulting in wide gaps and unsafe conditions. ROAD stepped in to help build her and her adult disabled son a new home.

We’ve produced several projects with ROAD and each time we want the story to be a little different. This time we decided to focus on how much ROAD needs partners to accomplish its goals. A construction project like this goes through many different stages so we decided to the best way to tie those stages together was to use a voiceover. It allows us to write a script that can succinctly tell the story without worrying about getting the perfect soundbites to tie each thread together.

When I’m writing a script that uses a narrator I like to have the voiceover tell the facts and information and then use the soundbites to convey the emotion. If there’s no narrator we need soundbites to do both, that usually makes the story a little longer because we don’t have as much control over how long it takes the interviewee to tell the facts.

This video was shot over six month span. We started a few days before the mobile home was demolished and then came back to site several times to record the progress.

I’m thankful to organizations like ROAD that see the value in telling a good story. This kind of project lends itself very well to video because of the action taking place and then the emotion from Carolyn when she gets to see her new home.

I’m very proud of how this video turned out. I certainly couldn’t have done it with my talented partners.