Culvert Jack 2017
The only music video I’ve made was for Michelle McAdorey’s Culvert Jack, a song from her Polaris Prize nominated album Into Her Future.
I first met Michelle at a dinner in late December 1999, hosted by our mutual friend, the filmmaker Su Rynard, but I knew Michelle’s music with her former band Crash Vegas. Our mutual friend Marsha Herle had done some music videos for Crash Vegas and Marsha was the person who introduced me to the fact the U of R had a Film program.
Michelle and I became pals, and she let me use a couple songs from her album Whirl on my film River. When Michelle came out with a new album I offered my services if she wanted a music video.
Culvert Jack‘s lyrics refer to “the sea” and I immediately thought about an area in Scarborough with quite discrete access to the Lake Ontario waterfront. The opening shot of the sailboats was inspired by Joyce Wieland’s film Sailboat, which Richard Kerr probably showed me when I was a film student at the U of R. Su Rynard was very close to Joyce Wieland, which seemed a nice bit of synchronicity.
I shot Michelle down by the lake, and the next day we rendezvoused in Toronto’s docklands to get some shots of Michelle driving around. I’d shot autoerotica in this area more than a decade earlier and it hadn’t really changed that much. My spouse Wanda Schmöckel has a better eye and steadier hand than I do, so I had her operate the Canon 5D camera inside the car.
