To celebrate the long weekend, we took Norbert (my cargo van that I use to lug gear) to Earle Rowe – our current favourite camp ground in southern Ontario. We made steaks, home fries and corn over the fire.
Michelle and I are used to the hustle of city life. While it’s handy for us to be near urban hubs for my gigs and our reasonably social lifestyle, concrete jungles and suburbia sometimes leave us wanting for… more…
When Michelle and I started dating, we often joked about packing up my van, throwing some supplies in the back and taking off; our only goals were to re-discover our souls, and grab some bad-ass drone footage.
These little weekends away are the rough copy of our dream get-away. While I spent most of the time helping make and maintain camp, I managed to sneak some video footage of what life was like behind the scenes.
Listening to my gut rewarded me with 33 minutes of interesting footage, 14 minutes of which I thought were noteworthy, and 2.5 minutes (which you’ll see below) that tell a story about how the simple things are often the most rewarding.
It felt good making this content. The footage amount was bearable, and the edit took me about 90 minutes, start to finish. To me these metrics are noteworthy – it’s easy to make good (herein meaning, visually striking, narratively compelling) content when you have mountains of footage, huge teams and crazy resources… This content, to me, is good because it was simple, I was able to be present to the beautiful company and scenery, and this video fun to make – all it took was my 1DXiii, a shotgun mic, a tripod and some attunement to my inner story teller.
Michelle was so inspired by this little video today, that we blocked our calendars for a trip to BC, our ideal adventure.
That’s a few months off so I hope to use my downtime to make more little “glimpses” into our dreams – some things we can look back on when we’re old, grey and not nearly as capable of sleeping on a single-bed air-mattress in a small cargo van.
As an interesting aside, this time last year I was gearing up to shoot my first show on the Some Things Never Change Tour in Brandon Manitoba. I was rife with grief in leaving my new girlfriend (she’s no pictured next to me in the below video smiling and making amazing steak dinners), and EXTREMELY doubtful of my ability to make videos.
Call me biased, but this turned out well. Funny how life changes.
In short, I burnt my lips on molten coffee. Michelle read a book about melancholic poetry.
Birds chirped. Fired crackled.
Life’s good.
🎥 x Moi
🎤 x “Kick In The Teeth” by Hippo Campus