The Surprise
Well, the tour ended in 2020. What tour? The “Words on a Page” Cross Canada Tour for SpiritLine!
In 2019 SpiritLine played their new music (my Words On A Page album’s tunes and Terry’s “Greatest Hits” album’s tunes) in every single province in Canada.
The tour got cut off short because of the pandemic but we did complete our mandate to play in each province. It was wonderful! Our other mandate was to take enough footage to make a movie of our “Love letter to Canada” but when we got home the “Go Pro” footage was corrupted somehow and no one could figure out how to retrieve it. I was pretty bummed about it.
Luckily, we had tons of filming done on our phones and a bit of Go Pro stuff that wasn’t put on the hard drive. Although Terry wanted to learn how to make the movie himself and even bought a lot of the computer equipment to do it, he just wasn’t into it and the years were going by. Finally, we decided to hire our nephew, Luke Pellizzari, a wonderful Vancouver videographer, to do it and asked if he could possibly get it done by this Christmas. “No problem!” he said and true to his word it was completed well before.
Luke started off with what he called “B-Roll” footage where he just takes lots of shots for background stuff in the film .
Next up, it was time for the interviews. Originally, Terry and I had filmed each other after every show. We’d be in the car heading out and we’d talk about our experiences at each venue/province. But we lost all of that work.
So Luke, set us up in our living room and asked us really good questions that got us talking about our experiences during the tour. He was SO good at making us feel comfortable and he was also hilarious. I had my journal out in which I recorded every single day of the tour and photos too for reference. We started at the beginning…a very good place to start!
The following day we drove over to the studio at ‘Bitter North’. Emily was in Toronto at the time and we asked her if her parents could come in and do some filming for ‘SpiritLine’ and she said, ‘Sure!’. She was really busy at the time and didn’t really ask any follow-up questions so we were in luck. We didn’t want anyone to know that we were doing this movie. Her friend, Elliot, was house-sitting their dog, Dandelion, but he left soon after to give us some privacy.
After the days of filming and some fun meals( and Wizard evenings!) with Luke, we flew him home and awaited the finished film. He would periodically send us updates and sneak peeks for our approval and change options until we received the finished movie.
On Christmas evening, after dinner, we gathered our family together in the basement and watched it together and it was SO much fun to hear the laughter and exclamations and comments too.
Thanks SO much, Luke, for agreeing to take on this huge project! What a fantastic, professional job you did and what an incredible ‘time capsule’ for us to look back on forever.
