How do you sell Canada to American tourists in February?

You make sure not a speck of snow nor a single sweater shows up in the spot, even if it means blasting snowdrifts with hot water and dressing the talent in sundresses and sandals despite subzero temperatures.

And that’s exactly what Radke Films’ director Philip Kates, dop Gabor Tarko and producer Eddy Chu did mid-January for a Canada Tourism 30 airing in the u.s. and Canada next week.

Shots of blizzard-like conditions and shoppers bundled in parkas just weren’t going to convince Americans to head north to spend their money, so Vickers & Benson producer Bev Cornish, writer Mo Solomon and art director David Rhodes decided the spot called for something a bit more inviting.

Thus the brave-hearted Radke team – enduring record low temperatures and snow squalls – managed to come up with a golden-hued commercial showing off Canada’s urban locales, with shots of government buildings, harbor fronts, and cobblestone streets all flecked in the cascading sunshine and shimmering blue skies us Canucks are desperately longing for this time of year.

‘It was brutal,’ is how Kates sums up the three-day, record-cold marathon shoot between Halifax and Toronto. ‘We were bundled up like snowmen and couldn’t recognize each other.’

The talent wasn’t so fortunate.

One scene required a woman dressed in sandals and a sleeveless dress to saunter along a walkway. Tarko’s gold filters hide the fact that her skin was turning blue in the -20 C weather. The frost-bitten crew was a step ahead of her blasting hot water on the snowdrifts (creating quite a slippery sheet of ice in their wake) and carting a variety of plastic trees in summer bloom.

The boards also called for images of Canada’s wilderness terrain to be projected onto the city footage, creating a nature versus city thread.

Luckily, they didn’t have to tramp through any forests for these shots – stock footage of can’eists, grizzly bears, etc. were transferred at d.a.v. e. by Bill Ferwerda.

Compositing provided some challenges for axyz’s Dave Giles. The exterior shots were filmed in slow motion with shift-focus lenses and dolly and crane moves, creating fuzzy, blurred surfaces, which Giles had to match up perfectly with the stock images. Add to that the fact that Kates sought out urban locales to project images onto.

‘It caused some headaches,’ Kates admits of projecting a crashing Maritime surf onto a shot of a Toronto skyscraper with a large section of curved glass.

The view of a Manitoba lake wrapping itself around the pillars at Queen’s Park was also exacting and time-consuming, requiring Giles to track the camera movement, wrap the projection and match the perspective of the underlying image.

But the result is an incredibly fluid and smooth set of images edited by David Baxter at Panic & Bob.

And a bit too authentic for Kates’ liking: ‘It was such a success, I’m afraid Tourism Canada will want us to do this every January.’