With the disruption that is Covid-19, all original ideas had to be scrapped and the project as a whole had to be downsized immensely. Ideas were thrown around, but I landed on making a short ad.

I wanted to make something that was in the roughly the one minute mark. I wanted it to be simple but strong. What I wanted people to gain from this ad was intrigue, and for them to want to find out more about the Downie/Wenjack Fund. With this goal, I decided that using symbolism was my best bet. I decided upon having a long take of some object, most likely an eagle feather, something that I feel the general public could recognize as Indigenous, with it cutting to the fund's logo at the end.

I knew that with no actors or essentially no dialogue, I wouldn't need a script. I decide upon having a forest background with the feather on the ground. From here I wanted to add some kind of tagline, something along the lines of "Take back our culture." Something that would emphasize who this fund is aimed to support.

I knew I would really only need a day to shoot, so I gave myself 3 different dates due to not knowing what the weather would be like on any given day. Before the actual shoot came though, I was feeling like this ad wouldn't do it's job, so I tried thinking of something else, which finally came about when staring at the fund's logo.

From here I decided that I would make two 30 second ads, one for Chanie Wenjack, and the other for Gord Downie. I knew for Gord, I would use the hat and feathers to symbolize him, but I was stumped as to what to use for Chanie. Chanie's was much harder to figure out as I was trying to be respectful and not distasteful. Finally the idea came about when re-listening to the Secret Path album, specifically, seven matches.

Once I had gotten my props, the hat with two feathers in the brim, and a glass jar with seven matches, I was ready to go. Shooting took longer than expected as the location was on uneven, muddy, ground. This made any attempt to get a smooth dolly in near impossible, even with my stabilizer, as my feet would immediately into the mud. Due to this I decided to just have a still shot of each prop.

Once editing came around, I was quite disappointed and mad, as no dolly took away a lot from the final product. Luckily, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as ended up key-framing the scale of the video, which gave the effect of a subtle dolly. This turned out my better than what I originally wanted as, with hindsight, a long dolly with the distance I wanted, in the time-frame I planned, may have seemed like to much for what I wanted. 

Once I got my colour-grading done and added the fund's logo, all that was left was the sound. This took some more work as I had to find the proper song, and audio I wanted. Originally I had planed to overlap tons of audio-clips, but when I couldn't find any sufficient ones, I figured going minimal might help with the impact more with their being more focus on whatever ended up getting used. In the end I used the song, "Secret Path", with the dialogue heard from the BBC special presentation of "Secret Path" in concert.