For the sixth straight year, the Toronto International Film Festival Group has shouted into the canyon and come up with an Echo. Toronto-based Echo Advertising + Marketing is spearheading the pro bono (as in free, not in support of U2) campaign for TIFF, which runs Sept. 6-15. Supported, also pro bono, by Hoodoo Films and other volunteer services, Echo produced a teaser trailer to promote the festival and a master cinema trailer to run before all the festival films.

Coming off TIFF’s 25th anniversary celebration, the festival brain trust and Echo decided to go with something different from last year’s splashier theme. ‘Last year we wanted to make a lot of noise,’ says Echo president and COO Barry Avrich, the spots’ director. ‘This year we sat down and talked about what the film festival was. We wanted to come into the 26th year of the festival and be a little more elegant and quiet, and the theme we collectively chose was ‘discovery.’ The greatest phenomenon about the film festival is that people buy tickets six months in advance without knowing what the films are. They go into the theatres, into the dark, hoping to ‘discover’ a film.’

The teaser trailer, running at all Toronto movie theatre chains for the month leading up to the festival, consists of a montage of photographs from previous festivals and testimonial pull-quotes set over the jazzy stylings of St. Germain’s Rose Rouge. Avrich says the photos ‘are archival shots of directors the film festival has discovered.’

The master cinema trailer, to be run before films at the festival, shows a well-manicured cedar grove with a man in a bowler hat leisurely walking while running his hands through the trees. With sweet flute music in the background, he looks up at a filmstrip floating in the sky. As the man takes a seat on a bench, he sees the filmstrip form into an infinity symbol (the number 8 rotated 45 degrees).

While Hoodoo provided the production with cinematographer Luc Montpellier and a crew, Avrich himself developed and directed the spots.

‘We shot the [master cinema trailer] at Eaton Hall, the Eatons’ summer estate,’ Avrich says, ‘and when you’re doing a pro bono job, there are no rain days. [The one-day shoot] was supposed to be a sunny day, and we got sun up until the minute we yelled ‘wrap,’ and then it poured. It was really quite something.’

Also responsible for the marketing of other TIFF events including Talk Cinema, Sprockets and Cinematheque Ontario, Echo will be coming up with a new campaign for the 27th edition of TIFF by Nov. 1. ‘It’s a year-round piece of business for us,’ Avrich says.

-www.echoadvertising.com