Canoe Conversations

Canoe Conversations is the simplest of the Fresh Air Leadership Company’s formats and the one that explains the whole idea fastest: put people in an open canoe, and the conversation happens because there is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.

At eighty three seconds this is the shortest film in the set, and it is short on purpose. The format needs no explaining. Once someone has seen a canoe, water and two people talking, they have understood the offer, and every further second is spent on atmosphere rather than information.

Filming from and around a canoe is its own discipline. The camera has to be on the water to be any use, which means everything is moving, nothing can be put down, and the light on water changes the exposure between one paddle stroke and the next.