THE MAKING OF: Ready to edit "WRITING THE LAND"

Needless to say it’s been a tough and surreal period dealing with the implications of Covid-19. Besides completely restructuring our personal lives it’s been a time of great anxiety as productions are being shut down left, right and centre. Luckily, my crew --Stephen Chung, cinematography, and Jason Milligan, sound-- and I returned to Toronto from filming with Ivan Coyote in Whitehorse and Aviaq Johnston in Iqaluit --our very last writers for WRITING THE LAND-- just a couple of days before serious calls for social distancing and travel restrictions appeared. It definitely feels surreal that we seem to have finished production in the nick of time. Our edit will go ahead as planned but many, many other productions aren’t as lucky and the effects on the film industry and people working in it is and will be devastating.

8 months to go until the broadcast launch of WRITING THE LAND ... where have you been in the past through months and what new authors & stories have you encountered?

Over the past months we’ve filmed with Uzma Jalaluddin in Markham, Catherine Leroux in Montreal, Ivan Coyote in Whitehorse and Aviaq Johnston in Iqaluit. All writers with vastly different backgrounds and writing styles but equally exciting projects on the go. Uzma, Catherine and Aviaq will have new works published later this year, while Ivan is just embarking on a new novel. We got some amazing insights into their writing, editing and researching processes.

It being winter the shoots all had one thing in common, which made filming quite challenging at times: It. Was. Cold. Given how much time we’re spending outside this is especially hard for my crew. Wearing big, bulky mittens isn’t an option when you have to operate a camera or a mixer with lots of buttons and dials. It also means that equipment simply refuses to function, and sometimes quite suddenly.

Cinematographer Stephen Chung was flying the drone one morning outside Iqaluit to capture the sunrise over the frozen Frobisher Bay when out of nowhere it lost power and landed itself on the jumbled ice off shore. What to do? There was no way Stephen and I would venture out onto the pack ice. We could hear it creaking and groaning, and while it appeared to be solidly fused together there was no way of knowing if it actually was. Besides, we had no idea where exactly the drone had landed.

After some panicked moments we were able to reach Aviaq’s roommate, Steve Rigby, who, besides being the super talented drummer for the band The Jerry Cans, is also very knowledgeable about the land and ice around Iqaluit. Together with him we headed out to find our needle in the haystack, gingerly making our way through the icy labyrinth, clambering over and under towering blocks of frozen ocean. Unbelievably we found it an hour later, drone and footage intact. Here’s Stephen and I -- happy and very sweaty. -25 suddenly wasn’t very cold anymore.

We left our last chat with you preparing for a first edit of your footage. Let’s talk about that filmmaker-editor relationship: How do you work together, how do you go back-and-forth but forward?

My editors for this series are Ian Sit and Robert Swartz. We will edit two episodes at the same time. I’m very much looking forward to starting the edit next week -- maybe it’s especially exciting because we’ve known each other for a while but have never actually worked on a project together.

We have many hours of footage, but since every writer’s material is specific to them, our options how to edit it all are somewhat limited. What’s more, our amazing production coordinator Maeve Kern organized the transcription of most of the footage, so I was able to prepare scripts for each episode with some help from story editor Theola Ross. These will serve as a baseline which my editors and I will be working from. I have a vision of what the episodes will look like, their structure and content -- but it remains to be seen whether that vision translates to an actual timeline of shots and scenes. That’s where the skill and creativity of my editors will come in. To take my vision and run with it, find solutions for issues we don’t even know about yet but that will certainly arise. The first couple of episodes will be hardest as we’re figuring out the exact format of each episode, but once we’ll have the structure worked out, the remaining two should be much easier.

Before the edit of course comes the content creation, let's look back at that now it's complete. You travel with your camera and sound colleagues as you mentioned, how does that 3-way collaboration work, what kinds of conversations do you have when you’re on the road across Canada, setting up a shoot?

Being on the road together means spending a lot of time in close proximity from the moment we wake up to when we go to bed. I have to give Stephen Chung and Jason Milligan a lot of credit for being excellent travel companions during long and arduous shoot and travel days. We’re also aided by incredible associate producer Felicity Justrabo who is always just a phone call away if there are any logistical issues like missed or delayed flight connections or difficult Airbnb hosts.

When we started this incredible journey last August we had a lot of creative conversations about the kinds of scenes and shots I had in mind. Together we had to figure out the visual language of the series, which required a lot of clarity, patience, negotiation and trust as cinematographer Stephen Chung aims to bring my vision to life but also brings his own ideas, sensibilities and skill set to the table. A lot of the time I think a shot could look a certain way and then Stephen has some great ideas to make it much better!

Besides all the creative conversations there’s of course a lot of time to share personal stories as well. After dozens of days together I can definitely say we know each other pretty well!


interview by @JuttaBrendemuhl

photo: courtesy S. Weimar