When this slickly produced, 87-second clip popped up on YouTube Tuesday, there was speculation that it might have been the work of one of Rob Ford’s potential challengers in the 2014 election. Oddly stirring, it’s effective as the sort of attack ad that’s less about swaying opinions than galvanizing a base. (In this case, the base is everyone in Toronto who’s had it up to here with Rob Ford’s shit.)
So we reached out to creator Kelly Manchester to learn how it came about, whether he’s connected to any campaign, and what tools he used to put it together.
Manchester writes:
No affiliation – the fear of [Ford’s] re-election spurred its creation!
I do work as a video editor, but this was entirely independent, done for the love of this city. I wanted to make something that expressed how I feel about “His Worship.” A lot of that has to do with how we’re perceived by out-of-towners, people on the outside looking in, because I think Torontonians know we’re more than just those quotes. Who knows, though, I’m really a “downtown elitist.”
I came up with the concept (and title), shot a test building one day, liked the look of the text on the wall, and then did nothing for about a week before shooting what actually went into the video. I shot the whole thing on a Canon 7D (with a Sigma 10-20mm lens), mostly on a single, cold Saturday in January, and used After Effects for all the tracking and the 3D text, Premiere for the editing.
We’ve come a long way from remixes of Adam Giambrone doing push-ups.
