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 that would chart 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 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.
