The Winter Games Torch Relay

MNP is a national accounting firm, and 2018 was its sixtieth year. The relay was the firm’s leg of the Canada Games torch run, and the park was the stop.

That account is the film’s, not ours: the man speaking in it says where they were, and why. If you want the reason the firm was there, it is in his words at the top of this page, and we leave it there.

A relay is an awkward thing to shoot. It arrives once, it goes past you, and it does not stop for a better angle. Everyone who wants to see it stands in the same hundred metres, so the crowd and the subject end up in the same frame whether you want them there or not — which is fine, because the crowd is the point of a relay.

We were there for the day. Sixty clips and ten drone stills came back from it.

The material is all Canon, in a folder named for the date it was shot, and the cut followed inside ten days — the delivery files carry the end of October and the first of November. The film went up on our own channel more than five years later, in January 2024, so the job and the upload are two different dates and only one of them is the shoot.

The deliverable was one minute. That is the whole job in a single number, and it is worth saying plainly, because sixty seconds is a hard length for an event that runs all day. Everything that did not fit in it went nowhere.

A relay is mostly waiting, with a few seconds of running. At one minute, the film is those few seconds.

There are three cuts of that minute in the job folder. The third one is the cut that went out, and it is public on our own channel — linked at the top of this page, so the length can be judged rather than taken on trust.

The drone stills are why this page has a gallery at all. Ten frames out of a one-minute film would all be the same day and the same park; ten photographs taken from above, on that day, are a different asset entirely — and MNP has had them since the shoot.

The rest of the material is what you would expect, and none of it is interesting on its own: production sound, a music bed, the firm’s own logo files in the versions its brand people use, and a good deal of After Effects.

Nothing here was staged. A relay is not a shoot you can call back — you get the day you are given, and the film gets built out of what actually happened in the park.

The clips and the stills are on this site’s record with everything else from the job, each carrying where it came from. MNP is on this site’s client wall. This is one of the jobs behind that mark, and the one that ran through a park.

DIRECTOR · BRYAN BAKKER · RENE DEFAYETTE