New Brunswick Video On-line

(This is the River Valley Rambler column published in the River Valley News on April 19th, 2007)

Video is everywhere on the internet these days. I even have it on my blog. If you go to rivervalleyrambler.blogspot.com you can view a 6-minute video of the New Years Eve Family Celebration held at the community centre on December 31st. I put the video together for the River Valley Chamber of Commerce, one of the sponsors of the event. You’ll see and hear friends and neighbours skating and enjoying the bonfires and fireworks display. It’s worth checking out just to see the impressive fireworks. The entire show is featured on the video.

It’s nice to be able to view some local video content on the web. If you haven’t checked it out you’d be amazed at how much of it there is. I put the words ‘New Brunswick’ into the Google Video site and it produced over 2,000 results. Some of those hits have nothing to do with our province but many do. You’d be surprised at the kind of video content posted there and on YouTube.

The New Brunswick Offroad Club has all kinds of video clips of four-wheeling adventures on the back roads of the province. Fires are popular. The first NB site to pop up shows a fire in Sackville from last summer and there’s even some great footage of the recent tire fire in Moncton. If you’re a train buff, there are numerous videos of trains shot at crossings all over the province. You can even catch segments of the ‘Fishing Musicians’ television show hosted and produced by Glen Ferguson of Bathurst. There’s a lot of professionally done stuff on YouTube and Google Video. You can watch all of the marketing and tourism videos produced by Enterprise Saint John and the city including the latest that compares Saint John to Calgary and tries to entice expats back to the province. I watched a nine-minute feature about a hot air balloon flight in Sussex that was especially well done. Two balloons were flying side by side and there was excellent footage of swooping low over the trees and dunking the basket on the surface of a lake. (I've added the video to the blog following this post... check it out)

There are a lot of family videos on there too. Plenty of birthdays for babies and kids jumping BMX bikes and skateboards. There’s music and dancing and just about everything you can imagine. It would take more than a day to go through all the material on there from or about New Brunswick. I’m amazed, but from the little sampling I did it’s all good stuff. Even the family videos were largely well done and certainly interesting. There’s something about watching real people living out their lives for a few minutes on video that is very appealing, almost addictive. I guess that’s why sites like YouTube are so popular.

So check out some of this local material for yourself. If you’re interested be sure to watch the Grand Bay-Westfield New Years Eve video on Google Video or on my blog. I’ll keep it on there for a while. I also want to feature more local video content on the site on a regular basis, some that I have produced and also material from you. So if you have video about the River Valley area that you’d like to share with others contact me at midwoodmedia@gmail.com. And keep watching.