One of the leading supporters of the rural telecom industry, Harry Baker of Sierra Telephone, was unable to attend the 2009 OPASTCO Summer Convention and receive his Lifetime Achievement Award due to health-related travel restrictions. Fortunately, the ever-creative Sherry Colgate came up with a clever way for us to see Harry’s image. Harry was everywhere, as will be shown in a future video.

David Baker’s acceptance speech on behalf of Harry inspired a different video that could help FRED, the Foundation for Rural Education and Development. Harry Baker has been a long-time supporter of his immediate community, as well as the OPASTCO community through his generous donations to FRED.

The idea was to create a video with a good chance of winning the grand prize associated with the SanDisk 60 Second Summer Mobile Video Contest. We mixed Harry’s image, a telco prodigy and a great cause in order to make the above video. The audio pickup on the G1 is not so great, so the audio appears to be out-of-sync with the video at times.

Fortunately, Mathew Baker was a great sport, as he had to work with five directors. As such, we had five takes. Since SanDisk allows multiple entries, we decided to submit all five takes. The following videos represents all five takes. I encourage you to rank the videos and view them all, as it may help us win for FRED SanDisk’s grand prize of $5,000.