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.

PBS contest

Giant Ant Media roped us in to help with the sound design for a spot they were producing for PBS. The piece was entirely animated, so we were able to have some fun with the sounds we used, making everything just a bit more over-the-top and playful to go along with the visual treatment. It makes you wish you could have the sound of a whip-crack whenever you felt like it in real life.

Voices

Our own Lisa Bettany produced and starred in this video promoting Voices, the newest iPhone app from our incredibly talented friends at taptaptap. As one might expect (if you've ever seen some of her other videos), things get weird, as they tend to when Lisa is at the helm.

I Am Ready

A number of weeks ago my friends at Giant Ant Media asked if I could provide some music for a video they were producing for tcktcktck.org promoting the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which is kicking-off today.

 Giant Ant did an amazing job with this, and for us video geeks out there, it was shot with the RED camera, which explains the quality. Put a bunch of photogenic kids in front of camera like that, light them nicely, have them deliver a message about our impending doom and you got yourselves a great video. I'm exaggerating about the doom part - this video conveys an entirely hopeful message. We have at least until 2012, right?

To hear some more music, head over to the conveniently titled page, Music.