Jayne Morris-Berry’s JMB Post Production has been operating out of Vancouver for nine years. With a very loyal client list from both Canada and the u.s., the New Jersey-born Morris-Berry has one of the busiest post facilities in town.

Morris-Berry has been working in the production industry for 24 years. In 1980 she moved from New York City to San Francisco where she got her start editing commercials. In 1987, Morris-Berry moved north to Vancouver and opened JMB Post in 1992.

‘We have a lot of u.s. clients and we work with every agency in Vancouver and some in Toronto. We are a pretty busy group,’ says Morris-Berry.

Fellow senior editor Don Macdonell has been working with Morris-Berry for nearly a decade. In June, jmb also acquired the services of Glen Wilson as a digital effects editor. Both Morris-Berry and Macdonell have a history in the music video world and, according to the former, have sometimes borrowed their video cutting techniques for spots.

‘When Don and I started to bring stuff to the table from the music video side into commercials,’ says Morris-Berry, ‘it kind of spiced everything up and people went, ‘Oh wow, this can be done.’ Now, everybody does it and the crossover is wonderful.’

Some of the artists who have left their clips in the trust of JMB Post are ac/dc, Moist, 54-40, The Philosopher Kings, Sarah McLachlan and many others.

The bread and butter of jmb has been and continues to be television commercials, however.

‘We have a pretty regular client base and we have had for a long time,’ says Morris-Berry. ‘Even our clients from the States are still coming up. We have a couple from Seattle and a couple from l.a. A couple of things are in our favor. We got our reel out to people early on in the game and the Canadian dollar is still a great introduction for us.’

With the trust built over time between jmb and its clients, Morris-Berry says the shop usually gets a good ‘kick at the can’ before creatives and a spot’s director get involved in the post process.

‘Everybody works differently,’ she says. ‘You find different agencies work different ways, and different directors work different ways, and some people want to participate a lot and some people don’t like to wade through dailies. They want us to do it. We look at it from the whole picture point of view because we stay with it all the way to the end.’

Although sometimes approached to cut longer-format projects, Morris-Berry attributes the success of her post facility to the commercial work and says that will not change as the shop continues to grow.

‘There is something really neat about finishing a project over a week or so,’ says Morris-Berry. ‘We do get asked to do longer format stuff, but commercial post-production has pretty much been the mainstay in what we do, so that always gets scheduled first.’ *

-www.jmbpost.com