(Above, A Traveller’s Guide to Montreal & Toronto in 2022 poster by Sean Henderson)

In the fall of 2020 I moved from Winnipeg to St. John’s Newfoundland, and since it was difficult to visit—both due to the distance and the ongoing pandemic—one of the ways I kept in touch with the city was to search “Winnipeg” on YouTube and sort by most recent upload.

Most of the results were real estate videos showing new development listings in the suburbs, but the ones that I found most interesting and comforting were the vlogs from people who were visiting or had just moved to Winnipeg, as well as dashcam videos of people just driving around the city. I became an outside observer of the place I’d grown up, seeing it through the eyes of newcomers, realtors, and clickbait artists. 

TOP 10 THINGS TO DO IN WINNIPEG!

Those wouldn’t be my 10 things I thought to myself the first few times I watched those kinds of list videos—but eventually, given enough time, one can come to even miss The Forks. 

What would my top 10 things in Winnipeg be? Missing Christmas in Winnipeg in 2020, I’d made myself a list for Christmas 2021 which would be my first time back in the city. 

Here it is:

10 - Pizza bite and 99¢ pizza 

9 - Spicy noodle house peanut soup 

8 - Train Museum

7 - Into the music 

6 - Donut House

5 - 7-11 taquito 

4 - Bison books 

3 - Maxim bakery

2 - Value village 

1 - Have a fire 

I was mostly looking forward to food—to me Winnipeg is one of the best food cities, I could list my favourite restaurants but I’m already getting carried away. My point is that in a pandemic, what can you do? Where can you go? There are no events, and it’s scary to eat in a restaurant so you get a lot of things to-go. 

Not long after this trip to Winnipeg, I would take another trip with Sean and Juliana to visit my mother (Montreal) and see The Microphones (Toronto). 

***

A Traveller’s Guide began as part of a video for the YouTube channel I made with my roommates, “Six Middle Gate”—Sean, Juliana, and I visited the train museum again during my Winnipeg Christmas visit in 2021 and shot a sequel to the Six Middle Gate video: “Six Middle Gate Goes On The Train”, egged on by the announcement that the museum would be closing (thankfully no longer the case). 

Since Sean and I would be taking the train from Montreal to Toronto during our 2022 trip, we thought we should shoot footage of us on the train on that trip to splice into the train museum sequel. Six Middle Gate videos are usually just shot on our phones, but with Winnipeg YouTube vlogs on my mind, I thought it could be fun to shoot some additional footage with my DV camera.

***

Starting January 1st 2022, I also embarked on the 501 Movies in 501 Days challenge, and in the time between visiting Winnipeg and flying to Montreal, I watched some films that would impact the direction I would take Traveller’s Guide in:

These influences, combined with all the YouTube vlogs and videos about Winnipeg, led me to shoot footage of the entire trip to Montreal and Toronto rather than just the train journey between the two. 

***

The three of us had visited Montreal in the fall of 2019, and it had been our last trip before the pandemic. What places could we go? What would be open? Where could we revisit? What had been demolished since then? A Traveller’s Guide took shape in answering those questions by retracing many of our steps—the metro still runs, the bagels still come out fresh, you can still walk through Tunnel Georges-Vanier. 

Toronto was an even bigger mystery, I hadn’t been there since 2017 and had even less to retrace. Unfortunately, many of the places we did go—Tibet Kitchen, Ding Dong Bakery, The Barn Restaurant—ended up closing shortly after we visited. 

***

I got back to St. John’s with 2 DV tapes of footage and cut it together chronologically with minimal editing—outside of removing a chunk currently titled “Momo’s Day Out”, all cuts were done in-camera. 

After a full cut was made, I wanted to experiment with a voiceover script. I created 3 Surveymonkey surveys for Sean, Ryan, and Juliana, asking each about things to do, facts about each city, and various anecdotes from their time visiting. I compiled their answers with some of my own, as well as some Google reviews for places we visited, and expanded them all into the final script. 

I recorded a version of the script and noted the times I said each line—my original plan was to provide each person their own script containing only their lines and the time needed for silence between them, allowing the lines to fall out of sync naturally as each person gauged their own silences. This method was eventually abandoned, though there were no re-takes or notes given to how each person’s lines should be read, and the final alignment of the takes still matches my original script timings. 

***

The music I wanted to use for the Montreal sequence was Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, (a favourite of mine from the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio play) but due to the strict YouTube copyright restrictions, I turned to commissioning my friend Jesse Lawrence to try to reinterpret and recapture the energy of Riley’s track, which he did beautifully. 

It seemed fitting that the other songs should also be from talented Winnipeggers, so I plucked and borrowed from: Sean, Isaac, Lino, Dave (relocated to Montreal), and Ross (relocated to Montreal). 

***

A Traveller’s Guide took shape, and funnily enough, during the editing process Toronto and Montreal became the main candidates for where Juliana and I would be moving after St. John’s (we chose Montreal). 

I made the deadline for submitting the video to the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, where my friends (especially those who contributed music) could see it on the big screen. The premiere would be June 1st 2023, which worked out well because we were planning to visit Winnipeg in June anyway to drive From Winnipeg to Seattle to see Joni Mitchell. 

The festival was extremely welcoming, and Traveller’s Guide seemed well received—though I immediately regretted the unprepared answers I gave at the subsequent Q&A and hope they will still allow me back some day.