The founder of Ward I Studios, Blair Cameron, has lived in Central, Western and Eastern Canada as well as England and the South Pacific and those experiences have helped shape his perspective of Guelph’s story.
“In Guelph we are blessed with a very community-minded community,” said Cameron. “We support each other and that makes this a really amazing place.”
Cameron and his multi-media team at Ward 1 Studios apply their collective levels of skill and experience to extend those connections online.
“It comes back to the role of story telling,” said Cameron. “The key there is the story. Everybody has a story.”
Telling a story across multiple platforms in an increasingly competitive and complex market is no simple task but that doesn’t mean the story itself has to be complicated.
“There is an adage in video production – ‘Show don’t tell’,” said Cameron. “You can talk at people forever but the power of seeing it, especially through a story establishes these emotional connections.”
Cameron started his business story on a different career path.
“I studied nutrition at the University of Guelph and did a master’s in nutrition here where I really focused on nutrition communication,” he said. “How do you take these complex scientific subjects that everybody wants to know about and communicate that?”
Video became his preferred medium for communicating throughout university and that carried on into his post-college consulting work for the agri-food sector.
“I started Cameron Productions about six years ago and that was sort of me doing one-off video production for organizations,” said Cameron. “About four years after that I started having conversations with other creative professionals in Guelph – videographers, animators, photographers, dancers - any kind of creative professional that can plant the seed for an idea of a collaborative enterprise.”
That collaborative enterprise led to the development of Ward 1 Studios
“We are a digital media production house specializing in videography, photography and animation,” said Cameron. “Our tagline is ‘Stories that are crafted to inspire’.”
They work with their clients to develop stories for various online platforms and develop what they call asset libraries.
“We will produce a landmark piece about your organization that’s a two-minute piece about who you are and what you do and then these breakout pieces that work on different platforms,” he said. “For Facebook you need something different than for Twitter, Instagram or Youtube.“
Their strength as a creative studio, said Cameron, is in their diversity.
“There is this saying by a Persian poet – ‘the shining spark of truth comes only after the clash of differing opinions’. The way that you get to a truth is by bringing diverse concepts together. That’s how you get to the meat of something – the truth of things.”
