In November of 2011, Pale Noir Records, who were going to release the Soufferance album “Memories of a City“, had asked me to submit a music video for a compilation DVD. I was so excited and on January 10th 2012 Jeremy and I went out for our first night of shooting for this music video. Jeremy and I had already done a film noir photoshoot just the prior month and I had started to write down location ideas. At the time I still wasn’t sure what song would be the single, so it wasn’t clear of the length of footage we needed. I originally asked Jeremy for four hours of stuff to choose from, but he couldn’t offer that much time. So we took it one night at a time. That day Jeremy and I met up at the Apple store on Saint-Catherine where I made my first tax deductible business purchase, an iPad adapter for SDcards; a slight compensation to Jeremy for his efforts helping me with my music.
The list of desired shooting locations
The first place we went to was the Saint-Dizier alley, between Saint-Paul and De la Commune Est, an alleyway in the old port that had old cobblestone paving, and was wet from the melting snow. Jeremy had spotted it a long time ago and knew that I wanted a film noir aspect and he was right, the place looked perfect. The we walked up higher on Saint-Dizier to the crossing of Le Royer West, where it was more of a fancy park than a street.
We then went back to the old Dalhousie Station (now the Eloize Circus school) on the corner of Notre-Dame and Berri, where we had done the film noir photoshoot in December of 2011. We filmed some very similar film noir shots that we had in the photoshoot all around the building and then some under the Notre-Dame overpass. Finally some of me walking on the overpass.
We then went south to the star crossing point where De la Commune, Saint-Pierre and Marguerite D’Youville all meet near the train tracks. It was there, upon seeing the shots that Jeremy was taking that I got the idea of making something influenced by Woody Allen. The intro of Manhattan has always been one of the best scenes ever accomplished and I really wanted a bit of that in my video. Or what Walter Ruttmann did with Berlin: Die Sinfonie Der Grosstadt. There we got some night building shots, some of myself walking around and also a great one of a train coming by, out from Silo No. 5 or Five Roses. Then a shot looking up Marguerite D’Youville with John Young’s statue.
other spot (2969) where you see the RBC building. Saint Pierre street
At some point we stopped at the Starbucks on the corner of Jeanne-Mance and Sainte-Catherine to warm ourselves up and have a snack. It was the first day that I used the “Abridged Pause tax deductible account”.
After a first night of shooting, I had just under twenty-one minutes of footage to work from, split into thirty-six takes. Jeremy and I were talking about going back out at least two more times but up to four more times. I figured that I could get enough material from three-five outings. I realized that I had no direction from that first night and Jeremy kept telling me that I needed to find some idea of what I wanted. This was during a time when Jeremy needed to be reserved/scheduled a whole month ahead of time for us to hang out because of his family and work. On top of that, we didn’t live that close anymore since he had moved to the south shore the summer prior, but at least we were aligned on Decarie. I felt pressure to go back out to film more footage as quickly as possible because I wanted the footage to match, all in the winter.
-I told Jeremy that I wanted something like 120 minutes of material, since this was a 12 minute video. At the rate we were going we’d have to go back out 5-6 more times and it needed to be within the month so that there would be no continuity issue. But he kind of laughed it off as it not being possible to give me that much time. This was a time when it started being needed for me to “reserve” him a month ahead of time if we wanted to hang out. we saw each other less and less, possibly only once every other month or so, whereas for the past two years we were still meeting up a couple of times a month to do urban exploration. I know that I was pissed at him because he wasn’t willing to go out and do more filming right away. But he was also doing it for free, and I was beyond broke at that time, so I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. But before I could even get him to go out again, Pale Noir dropped Soufferance.
I told Pale Noir that I was working on a full HD music video for “Dana”/”The Asphalt Jungle”, a twelve minute song. They were pleased and added me to their website. I was under a deadline to send in all that stuff to the label. Nicole sent me a contract to sign, but I had had a very bad experience with album contracts with Quartier23, just a year before, so I asked her to clarify some of the clause, to justify exactly what was being released by the label, and to mention the songs specifically. On January 18th 2012, I received an email from her saying that they no longer wished to release my album, because I was too difficult to deal with and was questioning their loyalty and judgement. That was a really bitchy move on her part because she knew how much time and effort I had already put into getting her all the things she needed. So the album got shelved, and the music video too.
I spent the next two months working on the Vision Éternel album “The Last Great Torch Song”, and I almost used the video footage for a song from the album “Sometimes in Longing Narcosis”. It never got made because my computer was running too slow to edit videos, and HD would have completely killed it. Only twelve days after the release of “The Last Great Torch Song”, my computer crashed on March 26th and I lost all the files to “Memories of a City”, including the photo shoot, the songs and even the video files. I was able to salvage only twenty of the takes.
Photo taken at Starbucks on January 10th 2012
Photo taken at Starbucks on January 10th 2012
It was only on March 14th 2014 that I located the additional sixteen takes through a hard drive recovery software. On March 15th I converted the .mov files into .mpg and considered making the music video at last but I quickly realized that I needed a lot more material to work with. I wanted it to be for The Asphalt Jungle again because I was planning to release Memories of a City that year on CD on Abridged Pause Recordings. But all that stalled. Ask Jeremy to go back out for one good image of Montreal to use as the album cover but he didn’t have time. Then a month later Rain and I moved out of Montreal.
In late March 2017 I got in contact with “Sly” Vasiliy Atutov and he edited/directed the music video. It was for Vision Éternel. In order to add more content I had already decided to use the Soufferance photo shoots for Vision Éternel on the website. So I decided that the same thing could be done with the video footage. Used song Piece No. Trois.