Two Hours Traffic called us up back in December to shoot a video for their song Amour Than Amis from their album Foolish Blood, which was released this week. Framing for 2.35, we took two DSLRs through the outskirts of Toronto and asked the amazingly talented ShuShawna Ricketts to climb trees, trek through mud, balance on things and explore such timeless suburban trespassing favourites as construction sites and gated communities.

The talented musician Jesse Cook invited us into his recording studio to observe his composing process. It was such an amazing thing to watch, we couldn’t help getting those spine-tingling goosebumps just listening to the beautiful sounds coming out of his guitar. This is another video in our series of portraits of Toronto Waldorf School alumni.

Grade 12 students Nigel and Erich built a 3D Printer. The Toronto Waldorf School was so proud of their work, they asked us to come and make a short doc about the project. Nigel and Erich demonstrated it for us and taught us a bit about mapping a 3D object!

Armed with X-acto knives and scissors, this epic feat of a live-action-turned-animated video was carefully hand-constructed by us and our team of supremely talented and fastidious collage artists. Produced by Peter and Josh at Vulture Culture Films, the video was shot over two days at Pie in the Sky studios and on location in the west end of Toronto.

Because of our love of all things analog, we decided to use nothing but actual paper for the final version of the video. This means we shot everything live action in HD, exported the edited sequence of 2465 frames (every second frame), printed each of those frames on paper (thanks, FedEx Kinkos at Bloor and Dalton!) and cut out elements of each shot. Then we re-photographed each frame against different paper textures and backgrounds and brought it back into Final Cut Pro and synced it back up with the song.

Here are some photos that we included as part of our pitch for this video, using Barry Feinstein’s photography of Bob Dylan that we altered with our paper collage technique, as a visual reference:

Here are some photos of the process – lots of scissors, X-Acto blades, rulers and self-healing cutting mats.

We used all sorts of different kinds of paper – from lined paper, graph paper, tracing paper and kraft paper, to the insides of security envelopes and old maps of Hamilton. We even found Arkell Street on a map – if you look real close, you just might find it in the video!

For friends and fans outside of Canada here is a link to the video on Vimeo.

We were hired by the Toronto Waldorf School to make a series of video portraits of alumni. This one is the first in the series and features Consuelo McAlister, founder of Local Buttons, a new eco-fashion line. We love her vests and we are so inspired by her work!

We made these acoustic videos with Arkells while they were waiting around before a hometown show.

A teaser we cut together for Arkells’ upcoming winter tour using footage we shot over the past six months.

UPDATE: Kiss Cam is nominated for a CBC Radio 3 Bucky Award – thanks to all the fans who voted it in as their favourite music video of the year!

PATHWAYS Directed by Dusty Mancinelli

THE PEDESTRIAN JAR Directed by Evan Morgan

Maya has two films at TIFF this year, how cool is that?

Arkells (Universal Music Canada)

We made this behind the scenes of Arkells new music video “Whistleblower”.