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Construction · Event Video, Aerial & Photography
CCA Connect is the Calgary Construction Association's social series: an evening built for members to meet each other somewhere that is not a job site or a ballroom. The March edition put it inside a vertical wind tunnel at iFLY Calgary, with OpenCircle as Presenting Sponsor and Co-Host.
Plus15 Media came to this one twice over, as a supporting sponsor alongside Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corporation and Boom Group Inc, and as the crew covering it.
That is the whole shape of the job. A recap of a social evening is not a highlight reel of a venue. It works on faces, on the moment somebody's colleague steps into the airflow, and on the room reacting to it. Everything else is context.
Connor McIvor flew the drone and shot ground video. Chris McElwee and Raphael Gay de Montella were on ground video. Corey Allard shot stills. 4 people, which is a lot for a networking evening and the right number for this one, because the night ran in 2 places at once.
The reception was the first of them. Members and sponsors around cocktail tables, OpenCircle banners behind the handshakes, name tags, drinks, and the conversations that are the entire reason the series exists. A host worked the room with a microphone partway through the evening. That half gets shot quietly, long lenses, from the edge of groups rather than inside them.
The tunnel was the other. Guests suited into iFLY gear and blue helmets, took the group briefing, and went in one at a time with an instructor in red while everybody else watched through the glass.
That glass is the hard part of the whole job. It is curved acrylic, lit hard from inside, with a dark room and a crowd of spectators behind you, which puts the spectators in every frame, reflected, unless you do something about it.
We did 2 things. We worked the angles, moving around the cylinder until the reflections fell outside the frame rather than across the subject. And 1 camera ran a polarising filter to clear what the angles could not.
The film opens above all of it: a drone pass over the iFLY building with a full parking lot and snow on the ground, which tells you how many people turned out before a single face is on screen.
The cut runs 1:46 with no dialogue and no interviews, and it needs neither. It moves from the aerial to the reception to the flights to the room watching, and closes on the CCA mark.
Alongside the film, a set of edited stills from both halves of the night, the reception, the briefing and the tunnel, sized for CCA and the sponsors to use across their own channels.
It was published 4 days after the event. For a series with another instalment already announced for April, a recap that lands while people still remember the night is promotion for the next one.
An instructor steadying a flyer in the tunnel · 4 March 2026
Remarks partway through the evening
Networking at the OpenCircle banner
