I Can't Stop Talking About This Global Helicopter Project

Links to watch:

• Search and Rescue Video (My favorite)

• Safety is Personal (series video from Brazil)

• Safety Vignette (SAR pilot in Louisiana)

See all videos here: https://www.bristowgroup.com/news-media/videos

My Role: Producer

Backstory: A multi-national helicopter operator's corporate communications team brought our firm on as a long-term video production partner across their global footprint. I helped to build the pitch and proposal for the client, then served as lead producer. As producer, I coordinated the planning and filming of interviews and b-roll at offshore flight and search-and-rescue locations in Louisiana, the United Kingdom and Brazil, plus c-suite interviews at their HQ in Texas. I also collaborated with their communications team on messaging, coordinated international travel, conducted interviews, wrote the scripts and managed post-production for every video in the series.

The large global footprint meant building relationships and communicating plans across four countries and multiple stakeholder groups. From Scotland's northern coasts near Aberdeen and the UK's Coast Guard operations in Inverness to coastal operations around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Each location came with its own logistics, safety requirements, and local points of contact to manage for gear rentals, permits, flight plans and hiring local crew.

Challenges: Coordinating and capturing air-to-air shots of helicopters is inherently challenging from a safety and logistics standpoint. Planning it across multiple time zones just makes the project more complex, but the end-results are worth it.

Interviewing subjects who speak Portuguese and scripting from those interviews were also challenges. I had to communicate with an editor who didn't speak the language and then get stakeholder feedback, also in English. There are so many tools available now to speed up the translation process, that the language barrier merely slowed the post-production process down by a couple of hours per deliverable.

Successes: The series produced videos that went on to win awards, and the client was pleased enough with the initial results to re-engage our team for additional work that carried through 2025, a testament to the strength of the partnership and the consistency of the storytelling across every region.

I also still enjoy telling friends and family about the most amazing work trips ever.

Behind the scenes in Louisiana, Scotland and Brazil.

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Centralizing Control Over 54 Separate Websites

Visual note: Due to my lack of usable visual documentation from this project, I made this nifty graphic.

My Role: Project manager, Assistant Director of Communications

Backstory: I began working at Harmony in 2014 in the central administration office. This fast-growing network of 48 charter schools in six districts all around the state of Texas was struggling to keep up brand and messaging consistency. Each campus and district had its own website and individual URLs, all managed locally on their own servers. Administratively, installing security certificates and adequately complying with ADA accessibility on each site was also difficult to manage. Central oversight had become critical. After our chief officer convinced stakeholders it was time for change, my communications team created a plan for migration and began the process.

Working with my IT/web manager, we researched current sites, performed surveys to gain insight and built a campus website shell for testing. We listed all of the must-haves alongside the nice-to-haves, and analyzed ways to allow the campus sites to be consistent but still maintain their unique features while meeting basic standards.

Using Wordpress, we created accounts at different security levels for everyone involved. I oversaw the creation of training modules as a prerequisite for accessing their accounts, to ensure everyone knew how to use the new platform before logging in. The central admin IT team worked alongside our communications team, as each campus IT person and most principals were trained on the new system.

Challenges: Pushback from campus administrators was the primary issue, with two major concerns. First, they worried that parents would not be able to find the websites, since we were changing urls to subdomains. We agreed to keep all current URLs active, with a plan to redirect traffic to the new subdomains well into the future. We also made sure that Google business and maps listings were up to date, and incorporated good SEO techniques to help our schools move to the top of searches.

The second big concern was maintaining the local staff's ability to update content on their sites. We added API widgets into the sites that connected to specific Google calendars, spreadsheets and documents that, when updated with the usual simple means would automatically update information on the website. We also embedded social media feeds, so that urgent posts would be visible to anyone who visited.

For the communications team, our big concerns were accessibility, consistency and branding. To address accessibility, we focused on having alt text for all images, increased font readability and contrast for use with text-to-speech readers and added a Google translate plugin for non-English speaking parents. Since we were able to properly employ brand and messaging standards across the sites easily with the new structure, our time was freed up to help departments and campuses with other brand and messaging needs.

Successes: After the (to be expected) change management hiccups were overcome, the new sites not only looked slick, but served the needs of the campus employees, students and parents well. Accessibility became a priority, with training and quality checks built into regular website management schedules.

During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the update proved successful. All over Texas, campuses were dealing with power outages, flooding, damaged schools and students in crisis. We were able to take advantage of the centralized features by posting much-needed weather and school closing updates so that the local administrators could take care of their families and focus on other important things. We even used these new features to post information on where students and families could find help.

Current menu example below:

Note: Some of the stock photography I took while at Harmony is still in use on the site. The photo featured above is one. I left there in 2019. See more of my photography here.

Creating a Mayor's "Wow Moment" at the State of the City event

Behind the scenes: I wrote all about creating this video on the company's blog here: https://www.thestoryhive.com/post/how-d-they-do-that 

Link to watch: (Note the full wide screen video is along the top, but we added a cropped version at the bottom. You can see it would be hard to display on a normal computer or phone screen.) https://vimeo.com/766512341

My Role: Producer, writer

Backstory: The former Mayor of Houston Sylvester Turner enjoyed videos we had created in the past (like this one), so his people asked us to create a short but powerful animated video piece for the State of the City event. We created a 35-second-long, 11,000-pixel-wide, animated visual treat where the mayor "travels" to all corners of the city in dramatic and stylish fashion.

Challenges: Capturing a huge and hugely diverse city in 38 seconds, and only in animated photos was tough. I tackled it by using the city's neighborhoods as a guide, making sure we collected imagery from each area and the big iconic features in Houston. Running the plan by stakeholders during the image capture phase helped me be sure all our bases and the Mayor's priorities were covered.

Successes: We won a Telly Award for this video and received several new projects from it. We were asked to create another video for Mayor Turner's final State of the City Address the next year: https://youtu.be/bLEtZMKBrLQ?si=oxK8XYN4Ot2U-Hj8