Kelly Kenoyer
On a brisk autumn morning, as fog clung to the hillsides, Natural Resources Instructor Blake Manley drove out to Holley, heading to a property on Crawfordsville Drive.
Brian Murray, a pre-sale forester for Cascade Timber Consulting, was already there, ready for their work that day: filming.
Since the summer, Manley has been working on a video series for his career and technical training class: “Manley Jobs.”
Manley said the coronavirus pandemic has been really hard on his students, especially since they have to learn remotely. Many of the teens in his classes are drawn to hands-on learning, which doesn’t jive well with virtual education.
“Kids who are good on the computer, that’s fine. But those ones who just want to run a chainsaw and cut firewood and learn how a log operation works are struggling. So we had to come up with something else, and this was the best I could come up with,” he said of the video series.
In a normal year, Manley would be taking his students on more than a dozen field trips to sawmills, timber sales, or fish hatcheries. But now he’s bringing those workplaces to them: including on that dewy field that morning.
Video producer Ramil Malabago quickly arrived and wired Manley and Murray up with microphones before they headed down the dirt road to a recent clear cut. Malabago slowly followed them, crouching with his camera to keep the shot steady.
The Sweet Home School District had previously hired him to work on basic life skills with special needs students, but when COVID hit, that job disappeared.
But Malabago is a professional video editor, and had been pressing the district to get a media studies teaching job. The district leaped at the opportunity to hire him for video production.
“I made videos for graduation, for the parade, and some community relation videos,” he said. Then Manley approached him with the idea for “Blake Manley Jobs.”
While Manley is the talent in front of the camera, Malabago runs the show behind the scenes.
“He’s the storyteller, and he’s great at it,” Manley said, “and I’ve got the contacts.”
It’s a strong partnership. While they were filming the logging operation, Manley led the interview at first, based on his vast base of knowledge about the logging industry. But as time went on, Malabago started asking for details, and for specific shots. He asked Murray to explain why tilling helps with tree growth – something Manley said he might not think to ask, having grown up in a logging family in Cove.
“The nice thing is, some of these topics, he knows nothing about,” Manley said, “whereas I’ll leave stuff out because I already know the story.”
And Malabago knows how to tell a story, and not just film a process.
Once filming is done, the rest of the work is done at Malabago’s home, where he edits video on a Mac computer to pull together some movie magic.
Not only does he handle the drone footage, the filming of interviews and B-roll, and the audio side, he also decides what story to tell in each of the 15-minute videos produced for Sweet Home’s students.
“I would like to not only focus on jobs, but the family aspect, and the history of this family, the lifestyle, and what their impact is on the community,” he said.
In the case of the logging story, Malabago focused on landowner Kevin Strong and his family. Strong’s family has owned the land for 50 years, so Malabago framed the timber sale around the family’s growth within the community while also showing the workers who make their livelihoods through the sale. Family photos make it into many of the videos, so they have a very personal touch. “Very different from Dirty Jobs,” Malabago said.
Malabago said he sometimes gets up at 2 a.m. to edit videos together.
“Sometimes I don’t even put the overtime,” he said with a chuckle. Each video can take days of filming and even longer in post-production.
The filming, he said, is “never boring.” He’s even woken up at 3 a.m. to film loggers in the wee hours of the morning using a drone. And although the editing process can be “a grind,” he seems to enjoy the puzzle of it.
“It’s a process with a lot of thinking. And sometimes you get lucky and a piece just works,” he said.
His partnership with Manley also just works. Each fills in where the other’s expertise fails, and they work hard to create a great product to help their students learn.
“The purpose is to accommodate the students, and that’s what we do,” Malabago said. “I know other teachers work hard, but they’re not highlighted because it’s not visible, you can’t see it. Here you can really see it.”
Manley said the video series will continue for a while.
“As long as we’re still doing distance learning in some capacity, we’re going to try to do a video every two weeks.”
The videos are available on Blake Manley’s YouTube channel, and can be found there by searching for “Manley Jobs.” There are three episodes out right now.