The goal: To capture the experience of truly learning about new places, as opposed to merely seeing them from a traveling tourist’s perspective. This participatory exploration will be expressed in a way that inspires people to improve their own relationship to their home place, and to learn more about how others are doing it.

The vision: Its unrealistic to say exactly how this film will look in the end, as we only have ideas, and cannot possibly know what we will find in our journey. The film could become something completely different by the time we are ready to produce it. With that said, our current thoughts are as follows.

Although the genre of the project is expedition documentary, the film will focus less on the individuals on the journey. The attention will instead be on the people and places that we find, rather than our own personal struggles and self-discoveries. We want to show that it’s not about who we are or what we are doing, but why we are doing it and how you can and should do it too. We hope to promote the value of locally based lifestyles by showing how the communities that we encounter are connected to the place that they live in. We want to demonstrate that the solution to global conflicts lies in the empowerment of independent communities. But we also hope to promote the style of travel that we are engaging in, a slow-down method that counters modern tourism and seeks to make meaningful connections with the people and places that we visit.

In order to effectively turn the experience into creative artistic expression with a clear message, we envision a film with no formal narration. At least, not by us. The film will follow the sequential path of our trip, with segments dedicated to the particular locations or regions that we encounter. Beautiful shots of the landscapes and people in each place will accompany music that is representative of the region and voice-over clips of eloquent quotes from the people that we interview, as well as natural sound clips that we capture. We will seek out interesting individuals and try to record thoughtful conversations, showing the essence of each interaction.

These place segments will be interspersed with audio and traveling footage of ourselves. We will capture natural conversations and shots that show how we are traveling and some of the lessons we are learning along the way. Again, this is not the story of our impressive journey on this huge trip, but we will include ourselves as the background guides to the film in order to provide a consistently familiar reference frame and to show the temporal progression and flow of the experience. The final product will have the soul-stirring celebration of adventure found in Woodshed Films’ 180 Degrees South combined with the persuasive audio-visual poetry found in Godfrey Reggio’s KOYAANISQATSI.

Below is a sample highlighting our own unique community – Eaglecrest, AK.

We were able to put together a short edit of our experience encountering the Northern Gateway Pipeline issue along the coast of BC. This is similar to the style of our bigger project, in that it aims to allow the subjects to tell their own stories with as little bias as possible from us, the presenters. However, this short edit is a little more content heavy due to the nature of the issue.
This is the ten minute version

This is the six minute version