Books on Our Shelf: Brand, Story and the Outdoors
Seven books we keep coming back to, from a 1950 Himalayan climb to a chop suey road trip across Canada, and what each one taught us about brand, story and getting outside.
Most of what we know about telling a story didn't come from film school. It came from people who went somewhere hard, came back, and wrote it down.
The books below have been read in tents, on ferries and in the truck between shoots. Every one is about a trip. Every one taught us something about brand, story or the outdoors, which is pretty much the whole job. Here's the shelf, and why each book earned its spot.
Annapurna
Maurice Herzog | 1951
In 1950 a French team became the first to stand on top of an 8,000 metre peak. Getting up was the easy part. The descent cost Herzog most of his fingers and toes, and he dictated this book from a hospital bed.
What stays with us is how much of the story is about the way down. Teammates later told a messier version than Herzog did, which is a lesson of its own: whoever tells the story shapes how it's remembered.
- Read it when: a project feels done at the summit and you still have to get everyone home.
- The lesson: the shoot is the climb. Delivery is the descent. Plan for both.
- Filed under: Story.
The Motorcycle Diaries
Ernesto "Che" Guevara | 1995
Before he was Che, he was a 23-year-old medical student riding a 1939 Norton 500 across South America with his friend Alberto Granado. They called the bike La Poderosa, the mighty one. It gave out long before the trip did, and they carried on hitchhiking, on foot and on a raft.
It's a book about a plan falling apart and the trip getting better because of it. The person who finishes the road isn't the one who started it, and that change is the story.
- Read it when: the gear fails on day two.
- The lesson: good stories show someone changing. Good brands do too.
- Pairs with: our Vintage Moto playlist.
- Filed under: Story, Outdoors.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway | 1926
A group of expats drifts from the cafés of Paris to the bullfights in Pamplona, with a fishing trip in the Pyrenees in between. Not much happens on the surface. Everything happens underneath it.
Hemingway believed you could leave most of a story out and the reader would still feel it, like the part of an iceberg below the water. We think about that in every edit. The strongest brand films say less than you expect and trust the viewer with the rest.
- Read it when: the cut is running long.
- The lesson: restraint reads as confidence.
- Best part: the trout stream. Quiet, cold, perfect.
- Filed under: Brand, Story.
On the Road
Jack Kerouac | 1957
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty cross America again and again, chasing jazz, friends and the next city. Kerouac typed the first draft in about three weeks on one long roll of paper, so he never had to stop to change pages.
The scroll was raw. The book that came out six years later had been worked and reworked. That's how we see a shoot: capture everything with the energy turned all the way up, then do the slow, unglamorous work of shaping it.
- Read it when: you need to remember why you started.
- The lesson: shoot like the scroll, edit like the book.
- Filed under: Story.
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Chop Suey Nation
Ann Hui | 2019
A Globe and Mail food reporter spends 18 days driving from Victoria to Fogo Island, Newfoundland, stopping at small-town Chinese restaurants and asking the families who run them how they got there. After the stories ran, she found out her own parents had run one, the Legion Cafe in Abbotsford, before she was born.
It's a Canadian road trip, a food book and a family history in one. It's also a reminder that the best story is often right under your nose. Most of the businesses we film are like these restaurants: family-run, the centre of their town, and full of stories nobody has thought to ask about.
- Read it when: you think your story is too ordinary to tell.
- The lesson: ask people about their work. Then listen longer than feels normal.
- Filed under: Brand, Story.
Dark Star Safari
Paul Theroux | 2002
Close to sixty, Theroux travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town by bus, train, truck and whatever else is running. Along the way he goes back to Malawi, where he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, to see what became of the place.
He takes the slow way on purpose, and that's the point. The in-between is where all the material is. Most days we'd take a long drive to a shoot over a short flight for the same reason.
- Read it when: you're tempted to skip straight to the destination.
- The lesson: the slow way in is where you find the shots nobody else has.
- Filed under: Outdoors.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson | 1971
It started as a small assignment to cover the Mint 400, a desert motorcycle race. Thompson more or less ignored the race, put himself at the centre of the story and came back with a book that still reads like nothing else.
Love it or not, it's a masterclass in voice. Nobody mistakes a Thompson sentence for anyone else's, and Ralph Steadman's ink-splattered drawings made the whole thing recognizable at a glance. That's what a brand is: a voice and a look you could pick out of a lineup.
- Read it when: your work starts to sound like everyone else's.
- The lesson: the brief is a starting point, not a ceiling.
- Filed under: Brand.
What's on yours?
None of these were written by marketers, and every one of them sells you on something: a mountain, a road, a small-town restaurant, a way of seeing. That's the bar we hold our films to.
If there's a book that belongs on this shelf, send it our way on Instagram. We read everything we're sent. Eventually.
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