daytoday 2025
daytoday is a diary film. For years I thought about doing a diary film, and one year I finally got around to it. I approached it as a film charting a calendar year, one shot a day. Given that I was starting in January, I decided that every shot would be framed doing something we do a lot of in the winter months in Saskatchewan: looking through a window at the world outside.
I used my iPad to shoot it and kept notes to make sure the location and framing of each day’s shoot was a little bit different from the preceding days, even though a lot of locations repeat during the routines of life: grocery shopping, at work, lying on the couch, buying coffee beans and bread. In my notes I tracked the day’s temperature and notable events both personally and globally. The sequence of shots in the edit was easy to work out – it would be chronological – but the length of time shots should be onscreen took a while to figure out, as did what the sound should be.
Despite the simplicity and brevity of the film, I’ve made feature films that have fewer shots than the 365 in daytoday. I haven’t made any film that uses as many locations as the 7-minute daytoday, which was shot in two countries, two states, five provinces, nineteen cities and towns, on the Crowsnest highway in Alberta, the Trans-Canada highway in Ontario, and from an airplane somewhere over Lake Superior.
