>> RODI: I'm Jason Rodi.
I'm creative director for NOMAD Industries which is a content agency.
Today I'm going to speak to you specifically about the expedition for the future.
But to give some context, I'd like to share with you, I guess a bit of philosophy of where
I come from, how I work and basically where I'm going.
So, I've had this realization that came not all in a flash but through the years.
I've been, I guess working as a creative professional for about 10 years.
And it's just been a couple of years that I had this kind of sentence come up the medium
is life.
You know I was very inspired by my clueless thinking like a lot of people or even almost--most
people that I are involved in the media one way or another, and I always like this idea
that the medium is the message and I always thought about that a lot.
And at some point, in recent years, I say only a couple of years ago because--it's because
of the interconnectivity of all the technology is that I came to this--to this step in my
own creative endeavors where I kind of let go of the technical part and really just started,
you know, focusing on life itself as my medium.
So, I'll tell you how I came about this.
This is my daughter, Jane.
She's a--she just turned three a couple of months ago.
And the reason why I put her up here is because she reminded me of when I was just starting
to watch movies I guess five years old or so the first films I ever saw--I'm a filmmaker
at heart.
And my grandfather showed me these musicals, so having seen mostly musicals by five or
six years old, for me this was not just movies.
It was movies of course, but I didn't think you actually had to make the film.
And my idea of making movies was a lot like the way we saw in Singin' in the Rain, if
any of you have seen this film.
It's like there's just one shot for example.
The whole movie is like this.
But they're walking across the studio space and they have three movies being done in the
background.
So, throughout this conversation they're going from one universe to the next.
In the background, as if it's just happening.
And they just have to go, "Okay.
Roll."
You know and be captured and that's it or the characters are going to go, "I have this
great idea.
It goes something like this."
And then you see the whole piece, the last ten minutes.
And at the end it goes, "Yeah, I love that.
Okay.
We'll put in the film.
Move on, you know."
And it's--it was just an instantaneous--kind of very I guess intuitive thing that they
seemed to be doing, which is why I wanted to get into to that universe.
Not necessarily the idea of making films themselves.
I studied in California.
I studied in NYU as well, film production.
And when I stepped out of school, I guess I was 22.
I came back to Montreal broke, I was having a very hard time making money in doing video,
doing what I love, doing cinema.
I didn't want to kind of work my way up as a PA and you know, camera assistant that sort
of thing.
It just wasn't me.
And someone, a friend of mine put me in front of a mixer one night.
A video mixer and I've discovered VJing.
And it broke everything I ever learned about cinema.
I was always very much into improv my whole life and so when I discovered VJing, for me
it was a real kind of revelation where I could improvise with cinema.
This brought me to start the Moment Factory which you might know of.
It's a--Moment factory is a company whose mission--it's been around for 10 years now.
The base mission of it for me was to push the limits of the medium.
I'd always been, obviously into the whole idea of storytelling on screen but this was
really about breaking that boundary of the screen and bringing it out into environments,
into--bringing an interactive level to the--to the video and to the story telling.
And 10 years ago, with the--when VJing was booming, a lot of those ideas were--needed
a lot of technological development for us to bring them to life.
There were three people at the start of Moment Factory that I think really made it work.
I was coming from film and Dominic Audet was really coming from the, I guess the technical
part of it.
So, he was making our ideas possible basically.
So this company did the well enough and it led to me four years ago to start NOMAD.
Things that were breaking out of what we're doing with Moment Factory in terms of environments
and so on and getting more into transmedia not just multimedia but really telling stories
across media.
It's a company that I started mostly to focus on content.
Because I'd really pushed--I felt those limits of what I could do in terms of projections
and environments with video and storytelling to the point where I really wanted to go back
to the content itself and get away from even the technical.
NOMAD became the space as well.
Our whole business model changed and we have this building on Van Horne.
Some 10,000 square feet, so we're on two floors.
We have shooting studios downstairs, recording studios downstairs as well.
On the second floor, we have basically creative space for rent.
So we're some 35 people in the building and I ended up going from a staff of always between
12 and 20 people to one basically.
Now, I'm really working from--with the people in the space which are all independent creative
professionals.
And the results are incredible.
The reason being mostly I think that for one thing people are there on their own accord.
So, they're really responsible for the space, what goes on in it.
And that means as well that they bring their own--their own activities to the space.
So, obviously there own projects and so on.
But also things that fall outside of the professional realm.
These are things that I had always been doing with Moment Factory.
I mean, Moment factory started with a website where I was posting one movie a week.
Through the films that they were putting up on the website it got us to know all of our
resources for the first few years of Moment Factory.
And now it's kind of like with NOMAD those have become something that we--that is much
more tangible.
Something that's--physical people are there, they're exchanging.
It's really been an incredible collaborative context for us.
That also brings activities like events and exhibitions and shootings and even improv
that we've gone back to doing video improv that are making then our collaborations on
the professional level, very strong.
A good example of this is the project that we just wrapped up very recently.
I--which brings me back to my daughter.
I want to convince her that the world is very much how she sees it in those films, you know.
That it is easy now to make a film.
To tell the story, you know.
No matter the medium.
It's not, you know, she's not thinking in that scope.
And it's really about living that story.
That's what it's become about for me as a filmmaker anyway.
And that's really what I want to share with her.
I want to open up her perception.
So that she's watching a film like Singin' in the Rain and then she's turning around
and seeing what her dad is doing for a living and myself, I looked around and realized,
"Wait a minute.
I am living those dreams.
It has become like those films, you know," which is why I remade her favorite film, The
Wizard of Oz.
Staring herself at the beginning.
She transforms into her baby sitter and then using, you know, strictly the space itself,
people around the community in seven days remaking this feature film, for my daughter
to then go, "Oh, yeah that's right.
That's just the way life is."
And she sees the link.
She sees that it's something that's just part of life.
That's it--that's a possible thing.
I want her to grow up with that.
Now, I'm going to just kind of step away from the career side of it and more into the personal
I guess artistic development of my life which will bring us right to the expedition for
the future.
I made this film, The Eye of the Son.
It's going to be about 10 years.
I guess next year.
I had the incredible opportunity to climb mountains with my father.
First one I climbed was the Kilimanjaro at 18 years old.
It was a very difficult mountain for him, and it was very difficult for me.
We didn't think we'd get to the summit together.
I got up there.
I thought he was way behind and he wasn't even going to make it.
And when I saw him come up only few minutes after, I really felt that link with my father.
That I never really had until that age.
I guess until 18, you know, when I was younger for me and my father was the man of all mountains,
you know, but by 18 years old.
We kind of--you see things differently as far as your parental guidance is concerned
and I saw the strength that inhabited both of us.
And that brought us up that mountain.
This led us to then climb, long story short, the seven summits, the highest mountain in
every continent.
I made a film about this called The Eye of the Son.
When I was in Fifth grade, I drew a comic book called The Man and His Dream about a
boy who was climbing Mount Everest because his father had died on the mountain and, you
know, he--so, I kind of had this dream way back but I had even forgotten about them until
I was on the mountain and there I was filming a story that I knew already, you know, because
I knew the story I wanted to tell so I was really treating it as a piece of fiction.
I wasn't treating it like a documentary.
I never saw myself as a documentary film maker.
I was just following the story and it brought me to this summit of the world and this was
a major breakthrough for me because not only did it open up the circle of what was possible
in my life, it opened me up to what was possible within the realm the filmmaking, within the
realm of storytelling.
That suddenly through the excuse of making a film perhaps we could do just about anything,
you know, live any dream.
Ninety nights and dreams took this idea, this theory and applied it to friends of mine.
People around me that were inspiring me, and the idea was that I took these eight characters
including myself so seven characters and ask them all what their dream was.
I tried to get to the core of their dream and then just for the sake of making a film,
we made those dreams come true, just for the sake of the camera.
And in that it kind of manifested itself for better or for worse within the characters.
One example is Maddie here whose dream was to be famous in Tokyo, is the way--he put
it to me in this way in an interview, "I want to be a pop star in Tokyo," and it just kind
of broke out of him and so, we brought him over there, we put him up on the big screens
in Shibuya Square and people were going up to him and asking for autographs and that
sort of thing.
My own dream was to time travel.
This brought me to the South Pole and to the North Pole where all timelines meet.
So, it was really always taking these metaphors and bringing them within a very real context.
And again this whole idea of the medium is life.
For me, it was really being developed, you know, where I was seeing that--obviously we
weren't following a script in this case.
We're really just following those dreams and seeing where they would bring us and in just
about every case I can say that the--no matter what they were even in the case of time travel
or something like that, I could say that in my own way and through the making of this
film reediting the past and also finding myself in the present space where there is no time,
that I had some form of time travel experience, I guess, which brings me to the future now.
The expedition for the future truly is a trans-media project.
It will take us from Cape Horn in South America, the end of the world essentially or the end
of exploration to the Cape of Good Hope which is in South Africa so the beginning of civilization.
This opportunity came to me--I'll tell you a little bit how it came about to again it
really understand where I'm coming from because it is an urgent matter.
I've been meaning to do a project about 2012 for a few years now just because I find it
so interesting this idea of the end of the world that's in the Zeitgeist right now.
I've been interviewing people the past few months about what their vision is of the future,
what--where they think things are going and so on and it's incredibly fatalistic the kind
of answers I've been getting and this is from all ages, you know, from all walks of life
basically people in politics, in education, in creative industries as well.
People seem to have this idea that whether it's this year or in the next few there's
not much of a future for humanity.
This is reinforced I think this year with obviously the whole Mayan prophecies.
It creates an opportunity because it's in the Zeitgeist the way I see it is, we may
just be manifesting this end of the world as we know it anyway.
If it truly is the end of a great cycle and the beginning of a new one, then it's a great
opportunity for us to look toward the future.
So, how do we have this reflection?
My father, a few months ago--three, four months ago comes to me with the idea of going to
Bove Island the reason being that he is visiting all of the world heritage sites.
This is a personal project of his but when he mentioned Bove Island first of all I never
heard of it.
Bove Island is the most remote place on earth, in other words it's the furthest you can be
from any other human being without leaving the planet.
So, it's a very special place.
Fewer people have been on Bove Island than the moon.
So, we're--this is real exploration territory but in this case I was just like why, why
go there?
Of all places, you know, like why don't--the--shouldn't we just leave this one alone?
You know, it's a lot of energy, a lot of resources to get to this place.
We managed to create a trip by adding, you know, fuel capacity on the boat and so on
that we go from Cape Horn to Cape of Good Hope.
I had this--I had a vision.
This is probably the best opportunity I'm--I've ever had to have a global impact of some kind.
This trip is big enough, you know, that--and in a time as well that's just right to go
from the end of--from the end of exploration to the beginning of civilization in 2012 I
thought there's an opportunity here so the next day I offered to take on and charter
the boat myself and invite people on to the trip that could create with me a collective
vision of the future.
So, that's the expedition for the future.
Before we go and while we're out there I want to be collecting visions of the future.
I want to hear from people what they see as a destination for humanity and that's the
whole idea here.
I want to be arriving at Cape of Good Hope and I--and as we just see the coast I want
to have that vision in my mind it's about collecting those visions, collecting those
ideas and bringing them onto Bove Island.
We're going to leave a time capsule there to be opened some hundred years in the future.
It's really about the exercise and putting this up online for people to take part and
quickly I'm just going to take you through the trip.
We're leaving from Ushuaia as you can see.
We're going to be stopping--we have these long legs out--you see sometimes five days,
sometimes as long as seven days.
So, those are really going to be like creative--part of our creative process is out at sea and
then when we're visiting islands, we're able to either be shooting or really just concentrating
on the incredible places we're seeing here.
The South Georgia, South Sandwich Islands, then some six days at sea until Bove.
This is an 11,000 mile journey and if we have enough fuel by then we're going to visit Kerguelen,
otherwise, we're going to go through Prince Edward, Crozet Archipelago finally our longest
stretch to complete our map of the future all the way to Cape Town.
We're going to--once we go to Bove we're going to--we're brining a guide along to help us
climb to the summit of the island.
This has never been done before so once again we're in real exploration territory here.
So, it would be fantastic for us to bring a discrete view camera along and do something
from island itself.
During our trip, people can communicate with us through Google Plus so I'm doing it every
way that I can on the personal level obviously this whole idea of projecting it to the future
is really a personal need that I have with a second child coming and figure that if we're
going out there let's really have this reflection with the right people on board so even on
that level if you figure it's a quest all of this, you know, it's not just a--I told
you about the whole career side, you know, and it's--then there's this whole other side
that's where life and work kind of mix together and become this one quest, you know, this
one life.
So, it comes back to my first point the medium is life and so you are part of that medium
and hopefully you'll go get involved in the expedition as well.
I thank you.