Loyola came to us in 1996 to make a video documenting an entire year at Loyola. We interviewed faculty, students, and alumni to capture what life is like during a year at Loyola and how it relates to their mission "to live a good life." This is just an excerpt of the complete video. This was a very large project with a budget over $100,000, at least 35 shoot days, and 2 months of editing. We shot on mini DV with the Canon XL1.

The purpose of the video was to show it at: "A day with the President" where donors would come and spend a day with the president of the university, and they would try to get 6 figure donations from them.

We made a documentary style video where all of the content came from interviews. Nobody was reading a script or teleprompter. Again, I had to learn everything I could about Loyola and the people I was interviewing through bios my producer gave to me. I created questions that I thought would elicit emotional responses and the rest was left to our editor Lucy.

It was great having Bill Curtis as the narrator: he's such a pro with great chops and we hadn't seen him in a few years. My wife and editor Lucy loves to see Bill because (English not being her first language) she actually learned how to speak english by watching Bill's newscasts when she was 4,5 & 6. Both Bill and her love to tell that story.

Director: Steve Weiss
Creative Director: Rick Shaughnessy
Producer: John Lenart
DP: Jens Bogehegn
Key Grip: Dave Schulte
Editor: Lucyna Wojtas
Narrator: Bill Curtis
Client: Loyola University
Year: 1995/6
Shot on: Canon XL1
On-line edited: AVID Media Composer