Hi all,

James here.

Last August, me and my production company, BlinkWorks were invited by East Metro Water Resource Education Program and the Washington Conservation District, out of Minnesota, to work on a series of training videos aimed at Parks Maintenance Workers.

These videos were to be part of an MS4 toolkit that would be provided to all counties in the state.  Spearheaded by Angie Hong, the Minnesota team had the absolute perfect outlook on what they wanted the video to be.

Basically, they had key pieces of info that they wanted to convey, but NO restrictions on how to convey that info.  The final videos had to hit two marks:  

1) convey the info points and

2) be as entertaining and engaging as possible.

They had seen too many dry, lengthy videos to let their video suffer the same fate.   So, after pitching a few ideas, we all settled on the concept of making a stylized training video from a the completely fictional Minnesota State Academy for Parks Maintenance, Preservation and Beautification.

Here’s the first video.  It focuses on regular Park Maintenance and how it relates to stormwater runoff…

Here is video number 2.  It deals specifically with Raingarden Maintenance.

Minnesota has some really great stuff happening with Low Impact Development and Stormwater education.  There are a lot of fantastically passionate people up there, putting out some really impressive programs.

Check out some of the things they’re up to:

Minnesota Water

MS4 ToolKit (part of Minnesota Water)

The Blue Thumb Program (bluethumb.org)

 Special thanks must go out to Angie Hong and Jay Riggs for letting us create this fun video.  It was a total blast making it.

-James