The film focuses on a man, stuck in the drudgery of daily life. Waiting on the subway platform, surrounded by others jostling for space, he makes an impulsive decision to run away and pursue his “Wildhood”.

He ventures into the countryside, shedding the shackles of everyday life–his suit, briefcase. He comes to a fire in the woods where he sees a shadowy figure through the flames. Chasing after him through the wilderness, the pair jump off a rock into a river, revealing that the man he is chasing is himself. The worn-down office worker stares into the face of a more rested, peaceful version of himself.

The message “You are out there” appears as he emerges from the water, born again, and walks toward a campsite with RVs parked amid trees and a fire. The spot closes with the tagline, “Find your Wildhood” and the GO RVing logo.

With competition for leisure dollars heating up coming as pandemic restrictions eased, Go RVing Canada (GRVC) set out to build interest and attract the next generation of Canadian campers to the RV lifestyle. Rather than abandoning the brand’s nearly decade-old platform “Wildhood” (born from the fundamental desire for connection with people and the natural world around us), GRVC wanted to evolve its creative expression of “Wildhood” to reflect the emotional demands of consumers in a post-pandemic world.

Working on film allowed us to capture the nature and tonality of the story in a very simple yet nuanced way. Even though shooting 35mm handheld in the mountains would be difficult, we knew that it would really help to capture the scale of the wilderness and also to keep a very natural and slightly romantic quality to the feel.

We chose to keep the camera locked off while the hero is in the city, then breaking free handheld when he chooses to leave. The Director wanted to experiment with using a blurring effect in camera so we used a special device called a “hand-crank” to manipulate the exposure of the film manually frame by frame. There are some brief moments of a kind of blurring and flashing which we did with the hand-crank in order to create the feel of this character wrestling with his grasp of reality.

Canada faced some of the strictest Covid-19 lockdown policies in the world. Confined for weeks on end to our homes, it was a moment for many people to pause without distraction and evaluate whether we were living our most authentic lives. This is reflective in data around record high “quit” rates, divorce rates, even demand for mental health resources across the country. With a recognition that a dissonance existed, people were more motivated than ever to find and live out that missing piece that defined themselves.