PROJECT: As the recipients of the Gresham Community Enhancement grant, our goal was to showcase the unique outdoor adventures to be had in Gresham. Our idea was to make a tourism video that would attract folks across Oregon and Southern Washington to East County, bringing opportunities for revenue and increasing market attractiveness to the Gresham region. There’s so much beauty to be explored here and our aim was to inspire folks to take the trip east out of Portland because it’s worth it! APPROACH: We wanted this video to be more than a handful of neat shots cut to music, so we storyboarded the story of a Portland couple and their dog taking a bike trip to Gresham to explore mountain biking trails, forest abodes and valleys perfect for picnicking. We felt that if we personified the experience of exploring the outdoors, people would be more inspired with the countless ideas of what a day trip to Gresham could look like. The bike riding scenes were storyboarded pretty rigidly while the forest play scenes were more improvisational. We had to be on the move for this shoot (imagine our producer, Ivana Horvat running backwards with a gimbal while the actors biked towards her) so we used gear that was portable, and light. Lucy stole the show for sure. Our production was scheduled to begin right as Covid-19 was ramping up, so we had to shift gears and minimize production. Thus, the decision was made to focus on creating only one video rather than a series. We decided to allocate more resources to making this one video shine as brightly as it could; using more locations and investing in longer but fewer production days. RESULTS: I Dream of Gresham was broadcast to 400,000 homes through our cable channels and was distributed online. We’ve received a ton of feedback but this one said it best: “This made me so inspired to explore the beautiful areas just outside of Portland! I’ve lived here my whole life and never considered what gorgeous areas are right outside of my city”.