Corey’s Story: Ambition as therapy

March is Brain Awareness month and this year’s theme is ‘Not Alone’. We thought this was fitting as we have been working closely with Corey and her family. What more of a perfect time to show Corey’s progress and how her relationship with her mother, who is also Corey’s caregiver, who has helped to create a unique kind of therapy geared for Corey. 

Prior to Corey’s accident, she had aspirations of becoming a Chef and attending Johnson & Wales Culinary School. She was in a coma for several weeks and although she could open her eyes, her responses were inconsistent. She was in a minimally conscious state.

We moved from the trauma ICU to Bryn Mawr Rehab. Corey was on the low level wing (which meant 24/7 observation). The therapists work very hard with all their patients but to revive the low level patients they have added pressure. Insurance companies want them to show functional improvement in order to approve the patients’ length of stay. Corey was not moving any part of her body including her eyes; they were fixated to the right. All she could do was blink. Needless to say, we could hear the ‘coverage clock’ ticking.

I was researching every article and blog I could find on TBI. One of the resources I found mentioned incorporating the survivor’s favorite hobby in their recovery regimen. Another discussed Coma and the 5 senses. This inspired me to incorporate “Cooking therapy” into Corey’s recovery.

We began with fresh spices. I would hold assorted spices such as rosemary, cilantro, thyme, basil, fennel, cinnamon, lemon, etc. under her nose to see if we could initiate a physical response. I purchased colorful measuring cups to not only identify color but size as well. I would help her try to point and grasp them as her right hand began to move.

We were discharged after 7 months. Corey came home with limited movement. She could hold her head independently, move her right hand and leg, move her eyes to follow us but was not speaking, opening her mouth or swallowing (she received her nutrition from a feeding tube). Within the first year at home, the home therapists continued using cooking therapy with occupational and speech therapies.

We purchased adaptive cooking utensils, cutting boards and tools to help her cook. We would place the ingredients in separate bowls. As we read a recipe, Corey would reach to choose the proper ingredient, measure, pour, and stir her culinary creation. Once cooked, she’d plate the completed dish in 10 Tupperware containers to donate to our local churches for their meals on wheels program.

Cooking therapy has evolved as Corey could physically and cognitively do more. Today, with assistance, Corey reads recipe books, chooses what she’d like to cook for the week, uses the weekly circular and grocery store map, writes our shopping list for the necessary ingredients, organizes the list by aisle, and walks pushing the cart about half the distance of the full store. The evolution of ‘Cooking therapy’ practices a multitude of skills within the Physical, Occupational, Speech and Cognitive therapies.

Of all the ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas we try, cooking therapy has been the most successful because of Corey’s passion for cooking and her desire to become a Chef. She feels as if she’s “normal” when she cooks. She feels productive. She feels like herself…the woman she was, the woman she knows she is. Watching her in her element, I can see her regain her confidence. Cooking empowers her, motivates her, and sustains her. It keeps her focused and gives me hope that she will in fact, one day, fulfill her dream of becoming a Chef.

SEO & Meta Data- How to be Seen in the Digital Age of Business

Read this post so you don’t mess up your meta data like Yahoo Finance did on their Donald Trump article.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, a phrase you’ve most certainly heard before.

If you build it they will come may sound great, but just because you build an outstanding website doesn’t mean web surfers will immediately come flocking to you.

The web can be likened to a brick and mortar store. Think of your URL (web address) as a street address and the work you put into your SEO is the location. Maybe that is a bit basic but if people can’t easily locate you on the web it’s highly unlikely you’ll get much foot traffic. 

What if I told you you could learn a few simple tricks to crack the basics of SEO. I am going to have to throw in another fancy computer word now, META description.  Your meta description is the blurb that describes your website and any particular web page associated. So when you post on a social media network the image, title and short synopsis come over auto-magically. Well, it’s not completely magic… you have to do some work.

Your meta description should contain words that are in your URL and tell your audience who and what you are and in some cases a call to action. If your store is called Fred’s Famous Hams and your web address is fredsfamousham.com your meta description should contain something about your famous hams and tell your viewer how it got famous. Just make sure to keep it around 120 characters. This is the amount of characters search engine’s show in search results. Think of it like your elevator pitch or a plug. You should be able to summarize your pages’ content in about two sentences.

Now let’s take a step back. I explained why having a URL and a meta description help your audience find you. One of the most important steps towards search engine optimization you can take is researching. Take a look at your competition. Start your search using keywords from your text as search terms. If your search doesn’t produce the results you hoped for you might need to change your wording. A couple tools Google has are Google Analytics and Google Trends. These are great tools for researching what people are searching for and how they search.

Check out the top ten listings when doing a search. There’s a reason these sites are coming up first. They have put a lot of thought into their text in terms of searchability. Optimizing requires you to really think about how an audience looks for a goods or services online.

Thinking about what your audience is looking for and how they search can make all the difference in your SEO. For example, if you need a website designer you might search web design or web builder. So if you are providing that particular service you should probably include those words in your text. Be careful, sometimes when writing text we like to get creative or flowery. Stay away from big words or lengthy phrases, web designer is easier to read than digital media developer. It sounds fancy but you’re not writing a novel or poetry, you need to get your point across quickly.

Once you have put thought into your search terms pick the strongest ones. These will be your focus keywords. Focus keywords are a way of telling web crawlers what relevant search terms match your webpage. Your focus keyword should be contained in your URL and in your first paragraph. Your focus keyword should show up between .75 and 1.5 percent in your article. 

To recap, for a successful SEO strategy you need to:

1.Research about your audience

2. Find your focus keywords to help create your content 

3. Build a unique URL

4. Formulate your meta description.

Just remember, SEO is an ever evolving practice. You need to keep abreast of how and what your audience is searching for in order to lead them to your website. Looking up industry standards every now and again will help to keep your website in tip top optimization shape.  Now go out there make your web page Search Engine Optimized!

If you need help we have SEO services, offered in our Web Management Plans. Happy-interneting!

Greetings!

Happy New Year and welcome to the new, FarmCat Media. We’re thrilled to be starting a new chapter and excited to continue our work making creative multimedia in Philadelphia.

We’ve always prided ourselves on delivering quality multimedia work at awesome prices, and that will never change.

We want to give back to our community by facilitating a working environment that provides value to our customers and the city.

One way we do this is by working with local freelancers—real, living, breathing humans in our community. We have so many talented individuals literally next door, why not harness this amazing talent… don’t worry we are.

This is what allows us to offer such a diverse lineup of services. From full production video shoots, to web design and development. We pick the best individuals for each unique project to give you the ultimate final product. We do all of this without outsourcing to other countries, while remaining competitively priced.

Sounds too good to be true? It’s not… just a lot of hard work.

We do all sorts of projects big and small. We aren’t intimidating like some large corporations, but we have clients all over the country and we’ve done work in over half of the 50 states.

Work with us and we’ll help you through your entire project, start to finish, all while giving guidance and suggestions along the way.
But hey, this is your project, so you let us know how involved you want us to be. We’re ready to go all in, are you?

Check out our “Works” page to get an idea of some of the work we do.

Here are some of our services…if you don’t see what you need listed, that’s fine, contact us here.

Most popular multimedia services in Philadelphia:

Video production
Web design
Web management
Digital marketing

Filming Corey’s Story

One of our long term documentary projects, Corey’s Story is about a young woman aspiring to become a chef despite a traumatic brain injury she received in a car accident. Corey has been in the long rehabilitation process and is still working toward her dream. Her passion is what propels her recovery.

We recently visited Corey at one of the new additions to her rehabilitation regimen, Go Baby Go Cafe, at University of Delaware. “A program using a low tech enriched immersive environment as a novel step to rehabilitation”, stated Devina S. Kumar, PT, MS Co Principle Investigator, Go Baby Go Cafe Research Project.

The program, led by Dr. Cole Galloway, is a new take on an old system. In most medical institutions physical rehabilitation, neurological rehabilitation and work therapy are done in distinct spaces at separate times. Galloway imagined a world where working, socializing and rehabilitation aren’t separate activities. They are one in the same, practiced at the same time in the same space.
This multifaceted therapy is achieved through a fairly simple harness suspension system.

By wearing a harness an average individual can rock climb, glide across a zipline and feel unfettered by gravity. You can do some pretty cool stuff that ordinarily you’d be incapable or too afraid due to risks. Take the above scenario and apply it to more simple everyday tasks, ie: walking, shopping or working.

By providing a harness for individuals who have trouble walking or standing allows for freedom of movement without fear of falling. This creates personal independance.
Personal independence, is a game changer.

By equipping Corey with a harness she is able to walk around alone, strengthening her muscles, regaining coordination and most importantly beginning the long process of resocialization. She is learning skills necessary to reach her dream of becoming a chef.

At the cafe she is guided, but ultimately has to make food orders correctly and must collect payment herself. Something which may seem easy to us, but Corey has to relearn nearly everything. She had to relearn how to cut a sandwich, slice a tomato and properly dress a salad. She has to combine skillsets and activities involved in operations of the cafe, just like any other employee.

This is what makes Galloway’s idea unique. At Go baby Go relearning how to walk and socialize are not thought of as separate spheres. When you walk, you aren’t just walking. You walk over to someone in order to converse. You walk around a kitchen in order to make an order. Galloway raises the question, “Why not do all this at the same time?”

Go Baby Go is about independance. When in the harness, Corey can move about with greater mobility and coordination allowing her to push past her limits. At each of her 4 hour shifts she is taking a customer’s order, making it and successfully repeating the process. Doing all this helps Corey to reactivate pathways in her brain and think critically.

Corey’s progress is amazing and something we can’t express in this short blog post. Our documentary is meant to shed light on traumatic brain injuries and the long recovery process.

Join our mailing list to get updates on Corey’s Story.

Filming in Philly

We love Philly! Even more than that, we love filming in this awesome city.

One of our recent shoots was something completely new for us, a parody music video of the song, “Take Me to Church’” by Hozier.

We started in the wee hours of the morning in a bar… not because we needed a nice Philly brew, but because that’s one of the sets for this unique parody piece.

Filming any scene on location is difficult. Our eyes and brain make the complex process of seeing the real world almost effortlessly. The same can’t be said for the camera, which interprets what our eyes actually see so much differently than what’s really there.

I’ll get to my point—Which is, a dim lit bar is a tough place to film.

How do you light a location that is meant to look dark? That explanation is for another post, but at the end of the day it’s no easy task.

In this instance, the building was old, so the floors weren’t level, surfaces were all different textures and space was tight, making moving and leveling equipment a challenge.

What was the most intense about this shoot was our race against time. The bar would be opening at its normal time and we obviously couldn’t have a full production shoot with lights, wires and mics all over the place.

So organizing extras and talent, while wrangling technical aspects was important to get all the shots we needed, within our allotted timeframe.

At the end of the day things turned out really well and we’re excited to enter post production.

The Big Screen!

In the summer of 2015 FarmCat Media proudly premiered “Be Who You Are”. An untraditional, fast paced documentary following two best friends and their cameraman’s journey across 22 states while collecting stories of everyday people pursuing their dreams.

“A cross-country chronicling of self discovery”
-The Philadelphia Inquirer  (read article here)

The film premiered at QFlix’s Film Festival in Philadelphia at the Prince Theatre, July of 2015.

After 8,000 miles travelled, three years of post production including: color correcting, storyboarding, audio remastering, navigating hours of footage, recording narration, developing animation, we created a product that uniquely tells multiple stories through a single lens. No easy feat.

We started with over 100 hours of raw footage, boiled it down to 88 minutes creating a beautiful story driven film, which was nominated for, People’s Choice Best Documentary.

We admit at times this project seemed to have no end. Between picking which of the many scenes and takes to use, deciding where the next cut should go, correcting aural or visual aspects and overlaying digital effects. It was all worth it once the final project came to fruition.

During the editing process we saw each part of the film countless times, so when it came to the theatre we had memorized every scene and line of the film.

This being said, the experience of sharing the piece with an audience was quite remarkable. A certain magic happens once a film is projected onto the “big screen.”

The countless hours of laboring were worth it just to see someone inspired by what they watched.

After the film, we had fun on stage answering audience questions and listening to comments. There was also some interest from audience members for a second installment. We will have to get back to you on that one.

FarmCat Media isn’t stopping there, we’re already working on more projects, telling stories of individuals through a creative lens.

Be on the lookout for more to come!

In the meantime check out our current and longest running project to date “Corey’s Story”. The chronicle of a young woman whose dream to become a chef is uprooted after a car accident left her with a traumatic brain injury. Forcing her to relearn nearly every aspect of her life.

If you didn’t make the premiere or you’re just finding out about the “Be Who You Are” Movement watch the full film here.