Video producer gains international attention
Video producer Pasquale Iannino will be heading to Porto, Portugal, via Schaumburg, Lombard and even Guyana, to collect an international video award.
The president and creative director of Rockit Projects Inc. earned a first-place award from the ART/TUR International Tourism Film Awards for “newest innovative short promotional film.” It was a marketing film for the Woodfield Chicago Northwest Convention Bureau in Schaumburg. The ART&TUR Festival is an event organized and promoted by APTUR, the Portuguese Association of Turismologia.
Iannino, a former Lombard resident now in Chicago, started Rockit soon after graduating from Columbia College in 2006. His clients have ranged from local small businesses in need of video marketing to large corporations, such as Disney and AOL.
The young executive started doing a lot of networking and met Dr. Mona Khanna, a contributor to Fox News. She suggested that Iannino participate in the Project Hope Continuing Promise Mission in Guyana in October 2010. He taped the daily events, which became a documentary, called “Med Site One,” which was provided to donors and distributed internally.
“We spent three weeks on the USS Iwo Jima,” Iannino said.
The film then won a 2011 Telly Award in July. The Telly also is an international competition that honors cable programs as well as film and video productions.
Also, while working as a filmmaker for Citysearch, Iannino met Dave Parulo, president of the Woodfield Chicago Northwest Convention Bureau. Soon Iannino was doing the Chef's Fest.
Then the bureau had wanted a video to promote the suburbs to meeting planners. They wanted something fun and edgy, Iannino says.
“After a few meetings I invited my producer, Jeff Higginbotham, in to help develop this idea,” Iannino said. “On the car ride home it hit us. After toying with the idea of the bureau being by the meeting planners side via cellphone, we added some magic into the script and brought the assistant to life.”
The production was done in May and it was ready for viewing during the bureau's annual meeting in June. The success of the video reached beyond the convention bureau. Iannino heard it won the international award.
“I was immediately ecstatic,” he said. “I think more so because its an international festival and there was so much tough competition. I also thought to myself ‘How much is a plane ticket to Portugal?'”
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