Vision Éternel Old Port and Mount Royal, Montreal Photo Shoot and Video Interview, September 21, 2010

This was my first real photoshoot and also my first video interview. I was in the middle of a revival publicity hype for Vision Éternel, and I was doing two interviews a week (for the short time that it lasted until I put an end to it). I was originally supposed to meet up with an acquaintance on mine, Jessica Pelletier, at Sault-au-Récollet Park in Sault-au-Récollet on September 17th. But for some reason this fell through.

Only a day or two later, on September 19th or 20th, I purchased my first fedora at Henri Henri. And I really wanted to show it off so before I could even reschedule a new date with Jessica, Jeremy Roux offered to take over as the photographer.

Jeremy had recently purchased a really nice Canon camera and we started the evening by meeting up at Lozeau, a camera store on St. Hubert so that he could purchase a new lens for night shooting. After going for some pretty awful Chinese food in downtown Montreal, we walked down to the old port and our first stop was by the railroad tracks leading to the docks. We spent a half hour there playing with matches and figuring out what looked cool in black and white, in a film noir type of setting. Then we walked closer to the water on the docks and took some more over there, with nice lighting in the background.

Finally we set up the equipment in front of Marché Bonsecours. After doing two video takes there, we realized that the lighting was bad and the sound was awful. We wanted to have the entire Bonsecours Market as a background so the camera was set up further from me. The waterfront being right there, with lots of people walking and having to shout to the camera, we decided to find a different location.

So we left and walked up Mount Royal on what turned out to be a damn cold evening, on which I was lucky to have brought my hat and coat, for the looks of the film of course. The observatory near the chalet was filled with people, and tourist groups that night, half of them still in shorts and t-shirts, and were all most likely sick the next morning. We set up once again, and after some quick photo shoots to test out the colors, we starting taping. I was super nervous, talking about a band that I knew no one there knew about, and I was still camera shy.

I edited the footage on October 13th, 2010, after Jeremy finally sent it to me. I had set up an entire promotional deal for the release of this interview, with one US blog and one Canadian blog both posting the interview (which would have been watched only exclusively on their blogs) along with 2 unreleased VE b-sides (one for each blog), along with the remastered music video for Love within Narcosis, and a short statement on which I was interviewed individually by each blog about the making of the music video and the b-sides. The Canadian blog, Pelecanus, who had approached me to do a cover story on VE on their own a couple weeks prior, told me on the night due for posting that they felt that VE was no longer good enough for their blog. So I sent both b-sides and the videos and interviews to The Inarguable, which posted a detailed interview to their credit.