When Air Miles’ agency, Notch Video, approached us to shoot a micro documentary about the music scene in Morin-Heights, we found ourselves discovering a small town with a rich musical history. The Air Miles’ Detour campaign is a contest among five small towns across Canada where the winner will be rewarded with a Meghan Trainor concert. While working on the documentary, we discovered that Morin-Heights had hosted many iconic rock legends. Cat Stevens, Rush, The Police and David Bowie all recorded at the renowned Le Studio. One of our favorite anecdotes was about the time when Keith Richards passed out in front of the studio, which caused a panicked cleaning lady to call the police. During the two days of filming, we captured the rich and diverse culture and the eventful musical history at Morin-Heights with a series of bilingual interviews and some inspiring performances by local artists.

With less than two weeks of pre-production, we started our research by visiting a local community venue to meet some of the musicians in Morin-Heights. After booking our interviews, we were set to film at four different locations each day for two days. It was time to pack our cameras and get ready to roll. We used a Ronin camera stabilizer for dynamic movement during musical performances and interviews. We also used a drone (3DR Solo) while filming the landscape since it was important for Air Miles’ to capture the town from an aerial perspective. Given a tight turnaround from conception to completion, we were able to present the final versions of our videos within a month after Notch Video initially approached us with the project.

 One trend we’ve been seeing from our clients is an increased demand for supporting content. Air Miles was no exception. Built into this campaign were additional deliverables such as a behind the scenes video and bonus features that didn’t make it into the final doc. If you want to check out more interviews with the talented local musicians, you can visit https://detour.airmiles.ca/en/town_morin_heights/. You can also find an extensive YouTube playlist right here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFidjE-tNfTCeGD1LbX74cfO2S4C1ofVc.