Canadian Cancer Society "Anne Had Cancer"

Here is another spot for the Canadian Cancer Society that I did the music for. It's quite different from "Gift of Hope", but because it was produced in such close proximity to that one (the same month) I thought it would be cool to use similar (but not identical) sounds while I still had them kind of bouncing around my brain. Also, because this was promoting the annual Relay For Life, it needed to have a quicker pace to try and motivate people to get involved.

Canadian Cancer Society "Gift of Hope"

I've been downtown here at Giant Ant Media pretty regularly since early March working with them mostly as their in-house music producer. The first big project that came down the pipe was this one for the Canadian Cancer Society. They had their big gala/fundraising event at Hotel Vancouver and wrangled Giant Ant to produce a video to anchor the evening and remind everyone why they were there.

The concept for the video was to hear from families who have members dealing with cancer, who have lost loved ones, or who have successfully beat the disease. Instead of seeing photos and videos of hospital beds, doctors' waiting rooms, moments of hearing good news, hearing bad news, it was decided that using illustrated and animated elements against a stark white background while hearing the families' words could convey the kind of emotion that 'real' images might not be able to.

The approach to the music was really about underscoring the interviews, and keeping the textures light but using a lot of bell-like tones and plucked strings in higher registers to stay out of the way of the dialogue. Nobody wanted the music to be too "on-the-nose" either in the happy parts or the sad parts, so the one constant was to keep a sense of "hopefulness" to it.

Hope you enjoy the video, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.