Official Blog of City Sonic Toronto

ANITA DORON is the director of the feature The End of Silence and the documentary Finding Body and Soul. She has helmed music videos for Sarah Harmer and Prairie Oyster and her second City Sonic film is with Tony Dekker of the Great Lake Swimmers.

LL: Give us the back-story on your film and its concept.
AD: I’ve loved Great Lake Swimmers for a long time. (I used the song “”This is Not Like Home”" in my film The End of Silence, and thank Tony and weework records for supporting indie film.) The idea for this doc was pretty instant. Picturing Tony writing his song “”I Will never See The Sun”" in the ceramic depth of the Toronto subway system made me see a gloomy, sweetly warped, animated graphic novel. Tony is also the perfect protagonist of a gloomy, sweetly warped graphic novel documentary. I want to show what was happening inside Tony when he wrote the song, or my interpretation of Tony’s imagination at work, transforming the visual and aural monotony of riding the subway into a beautiful song.

LL: What did you learn about Tony that surprised you?
This was more of a delight than a surprise – Tony collects and traces the histories of melodies. Where did a song start, how did it evolve over time and within different cultures… It is an exciting way of looking at music and his stories and knowledge fascinate me.

LL: Any advice for other filmmakers on how to work within the 4-minute time limit?
First of all, don’t listen to advice much because everybody has their own insular way of creating that makes sense to them but may be complete bullshit to you. But for me, in short format, I need to find a core thing to get truly excited about, very specifically and very precisely. Once I work from that place of thrill and a kind of love, everything flows and becomes clear and simple. If I over think and overanalyze, it all turns hollow.

LL: How do you see the future of films made for mobile?
I think we will see projects developed with better knowledge of the technology, the future possibilities and creativity that is proprietary to it. They will not be films, but something completely new and different, with their own language and conventions. This is why CitySonic is so exciting to me – it utilizes the technology and builds from it to create a project, instead of trying to fit a film into the new technology”

Director Anita Doron decided to do something different when trying to recreate Tony Dekker’s inspirational subway commute past Spadina station. So using a dark quiet room she filmed the Great Lakes Swimmer front-man and then made an animated short film. You can check out the film which rolls out this Friday. Until then, check out the production pics from the shoot here.

Shooting inside the Toronto Transit Commission system is actually not as difficult as it might seem: TTC brass are quite welcoming to film-makers, their policies as reasonable to navigate as the Bloor-Danforth line. But how to make the subway magic, to capture the ethereal beauty of a Great Lake Swimmers song? Director Anita Doron knew what to do, and it involved taking Tony Dekker in an unexpected direction, dimension.