With his National Parks Project, Geoff Morrison has covered a lot of ground. Like film, music, photography, art, television and web.
His multi-medium project is meant to reflect the real-life ground of Canada’s vast National Parks, where Morrison and co-creators Ryan Noth and Joel McConvey made 13 short films and matching television documentaries, recorded albums by Canadian musicians and documented the whole thing with a superb interactive installation.
Five of the movies screened at the recent SXSW Movie festival, along with a concert series by the musicians from the film and an accompanying art show, in Austin, TX.
That’s where I met Morrison to talk more about his ambitious ode to Canada’s parks.
If these films are documenting 13 National Parks, then what are the television documentaries documenting?
There’s the films and there’s a TV series. The television documentaries are like vérité style we were filming whenever we could. The film shooting was a lot more specific.
So there were two shoots: there were 13 films, then 13 documentaries of making of the films. The films take up two hours and seven minutes, and that’s what we’re screening at Hot Docs. The documentaries are on Discovery World HD.
So tell me about why you’re at SXSW.
We’re screening five of the short films, and then there’s a 30-40 minute music set by six of the musicians that are playing showcases here. They’re going to form a group and perform the songs they wrote and recorded in the parks, and there’ll be a live mix visual set with images from the parks to accompany the music.
How’d you hook up with those musicians?
I think they just wanted something different from what most of them are used to. When you do an album, you record, then you go on tour and so on. This is a really different artistic experiment. Some of them saw it as a test, five days to write and record this music.
The collaborations with different artists was an appeal too. Some of those are pretty out there. Melissa Auf Der Mar, with Jamie Fleming and Sam Shalabi, and Shad with Besnard Lakes…
It was an easy sell.
When I think of music coming from the wilderness, I think of –
Camp fire music?
Well. Like Bon Iver stuff.
There is very little Bon Iver stuff – not that that’s bad. But it’s all very different. There’s some acoustic, camp fire stuff, and then there is loud electric guitar stuff on there. The group that went to the Yukon brought back some spacey experimental pop.
There was a constant conversation between the director and the musicians to write for the films.
On the majority of the trips, the musicians took it upon themselves to write their own compositions. The full length album we will put out in May are songs that weren’t used for the films – more structured pop songs. Kathleen Edwards wrote an incredible song with Sam Roberts and Matt Mays in Wapusk National Park in northern Manitoba for Hubert Davis’s film. It ended up not being the right vibe for film but it’ll appear on her next album too.
Album, movie, TV series…and what’s the interactive piece?
Each week after the episodes, two new parks on the website get launched. So after you watch the show you can stream the film, listen to the music, there there’s music videos and photos galleries…It’s like this immersive journey through the 13 parks.
I’ve seen the trailer for the films, and some of the scenes are really stunning. How did you get those?
It took forever! Weeks of planning to get the helicopter there on a certain day…it was an hour late…we were back and forth on the satellite phone…but we got some amazing aerials.
Why did you choose parks?
We chose right now, 100 years after the creation of Canada’s National Parks Services, to see what this survey of Canadian artists would create as a response to the environment to these special places.
And there’s certainly a conservation and ecological message as well that’s kind of embedded in images and the music. You’re not hit over the head with it, but you’ll see these films and get that these are beautiful amazing places and they need to be protected.
National Parks Projects airs Saturdays at 8pm and Tuesdays at 9pm on Discovery World HD.
