Welcome to The Graphic Works

Johnstown Men Make Movies near Hollywood

By Sandie Biddle

JOHNSTOWN – Hollywood movie moguls routinely travel to far away places and remote locations to produce feature-length films. However, it’s not often video directors from Johnstown travel to Southern California to film location footage.

Joe Workosky, John Concannon, and Tom Concannon, all Johnstown residents, recently completed a week of intense video production at a Reliant Energy generating facility located in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, a few miles from Hollywood.

The local men traveled to the Los Angeles area to create a safety DVD for the Etiwanda Power Plant located in Rancho Cucamonga. The program will be used in educating and training contractors and visitors to the plant – raising awareness about the rules and regulations of working there. The plant burns natural gas to produce electricity for use in the greater Los Angeles region.

“Safety is a matter of life and death and we believe the DVD created by Joe, John, and Tom will ensure delivery of a consistent safety message to our contractors and visitors,” said Lee Moore, Etiwanda general manager. “During a planned outage, we may have hundreds of contract workers on site each day and each one will have to view the Etiwanda safety program before their job begins.”

Workosky and Concannon have helped train thousands of workers in the utility, manufacturing, and railroad industries with their safety DVD programs.
According to Paul Lacroix, Etiwanda environmental and safety representative, “The first priority of my job is the safety of personnel at the station; the second is to comply with all government and corporate regulations. This program stresses specific rules for on-site workers and covers processes and procedures unique to our plant.”

During their California mission, the trio videotaped station employees at work in the control room, machine shop, and crane bay. Exterior views of the plant featured the main office, turbines, generators, and cooling towers.

Workosky and Concannon took advantage of California’s clear skies to get a birds-eye perspective by shooting aerial videography and still photography from an open-door helicopter.

“We spent weeks writing the script prior to our western trip and, after a lengthy approval process, the final version was approved,” Workosky said. “The script – complete with corporate, union, and OSHA guidelines – became our blueprint for shooting the on-site video scenes and will be used to create a Spanish DVD version, too.”

Workosky and Concannon are veteran industrial filmmakers, each with three decades of experience in this specialized field. They’ve produced many projects together as a two-man team; however, for this long-distance production they enlisted additional assistance.
Concannon’s brother, Tom, is executive commercial producer for Fox 8 TV in Johnstown and is an expert videographer. He’s responsible for the production of many of the TV commercials seen on the local Fox 8 affiliate and ABC 23, too.

“We invited Tom on this cross-country journey to provide additional camera angles and help us cover the large generating facility in an efficient and cost-effective manner,” John said. “As we shot the 20 hours of videotape, Tom’s experience proved invaluable for Joe and me during this complex assignment.”

Workosky, owner of The Graphic Works, and Concannon, president of Interact-Interactive Media Systems, teamed up five years ago to specialize in the creation of customized safety DVDs for business and industry. The men have completed similar safety projects for clients in Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey, in addition to numerous cities throughout Pennsylvania.

The men have also produced TV programming for national broadcast and cablecast outlets; marketing DVDs for travel and tourism bureaus; and TV commercials for political campaigns, auto dealerships, trade schools, and other local businesses.
They plan for the DVD to premier in California at an Etiwanda Safety meeting in mid-summer. ~PBC