UNDISRUPTED
The National Arts Center Orchestra
A behind-the-scenes journey documenting the production of a unique COVID era MUSIC SERIES.
Content: promotional mini-doc, episodic trailers, episodic content
Produced for: broadcast & promotion
Almost overnight the pandemic decimated the performing arts sector—leaving empty seats and disrupting plans for artists all over the world.
Responding to these highly disruptive times…key creative leadership at the National Arts Centre Orchestra came together to create a collaborative project that would give performing artists their voices back. Our team was engaged early to creatively develop a promotional mini-documentary that would give the audience a glimpse behind the scenes to show them the passion and collaboration that goes into a project like ‘UNDISRUPTED’.
Four leading Canadian artists—singer/songwriter Shawnee Kish, soprano Measha Brueggergosman, film-maker Nicole Lizée, and composer Ana Sokoloviċ—were each offered a blank canvas to curate a 30-minute episode to tell their own unique story. They each blended orchestral music, other music styles, cinematography, and mixed-reality visual effects.
We focused on telling the story of how the artists felt about creating during such an extremely unique time.
We wanted to create a project that engages in a profound way with the Canadian public and demonstrates how a symphony orchestra can become a vehicle for powerful storytelling and a tool for social inclusion.
-Alexander Shelley, Music Director of the NAC Orchestra
As we assembled the trailers we started to see the artistic vision come to life in combination with the VFX and performance footage.
From notions of identity, memory, and folklore to de-dramatizing the pandemic in the context of human history—each artist had a personal theme they were exploring. During production we were really only able to experience one key aspect to each episode—the music—but it became clear that as each layer of the collaboration was added…every episode became clearly so much more than the music.