Video production company empties its vaults

Midland Video Productions Inc. in Milwaukee opened its doors in 1980. In commemoration of the company’s 30-year history, Midland Video has launched a company blog that features a series of videos and outtakes from the production company’s archives.
“At the end of every year, we go back through our archives and choose around five or six clips to add to our ‘what have we done’ history site,” said Neil Jaehnert, who co-founded the company with George Liberatore.”This year, we decided we would do a little something extra to celebrate our 30-year anniversary.”
The company plans to launch a new blog post with a video component from its archives every Monday for the rest of 2010, Jaehnert said.
This week’s video features an outtake from Christopher Reeve’s 1996 video shoot just after his tragic accident. According to Jaehnert, Reeve was insistent on doing additional takes even after the company had a good one. In the featured outtake, he apologizes for not having enough strength to deliver the message like he wanted.
The shoot was done at Reeve’s home in New York and was being shot for a school in Illinois that had developed a program for students with spinal cord injuries.
“We’ve created thousands of videos over the past few decades,” Jaehnert said. “But we wanted to highlight a select few that have unique stories behind them or are particularly meaningful for different reasons.”
Upcoming videos will feature Mother Theresa, a Ronald McDonald training session, footage shot for some local Milwaukee companies, and the eternal jokester Leslie Nielsen, Jaehnert said. Most of the blog posts will include a video, but some will include only still shots, he said.
“Video production is an important part of the Milwaukee community,” Jaehnert said. “We have been around and doing it for longer than almost anyone else I think, and so we wanted to share some of our memories with the public because a lot of it is thier history too.”
Check out the Christopher Reeve out take at the Midland Video blog, and check back next week for a new update from the archives: www.midlandvideo.com/blog