25 Apr I Rise Up Canada!

A week ago, a friend approached me to do a music video for the upcoming Canadian federal election. I had done one for Nenshi in the municipal campaign.

I had no time, yet that this was one of those spontaneous, creative, socially-engaged projects that was simply impossible to refuse. With only 48 hours to shoot and edit most of it, at least I’d be done before my anniversary (or so I thought).

In a collaboration between Melissa D’Souza (print shop owner and singer), Pinstripe Creative, and Hidden Story Productions, we put together Rise Up Canada. While we were motivated to do it because of Ignatieff’s Rise Up speech, the song was first written as Rise Up Calgary for the civic election.

However, when we put it out there, people loved the production but were split on the message. In our little world, we thought Ignatieff’s speech was about crossing partisan lines. But of course, it’s hard to convey that when only one party leader is in it.

So after seeing the Twitter and YouTube feeds, we quickly redid the video to remove the speech and instead make a call out for other people to record their own message. Hopefully this will at least get people to think about what they stand for.

In the meantime, I’ve got to get some sleep! 🙂

Chris

P.S. – After just having taken a lighting course, I’ve learned that lighting gives you another degree of freedom. I didn’t have a real studio to shoot in (walls were a horrible colour). Nor did I have the time to run around the city and shoot. So I played with the lights and it didn’t turn out too bad.