Sid Lee and Jimmy Lee: My First Views of Montréal
My first steps as a professional videographer brought me to Sid Lee, then into Jimmy Lee’s world. From 2011, the collaboration gave me opportunities to create content for Tourisme Montréal. It holds an important place in my career: I began building a perspective on the city while discovering work with an agency and its creative teams.
Montréal, a Collection of Moments
With The Montreal Buzz and MTL Moments, the city became a creative playground. The content needed to make people want to discover Montréal through its places, atmospheres and the people giving it personality. My videography connected the field with postproduction: gathering images, then finding how they could tell an experience.
Jean-Talon Market in Fall 2013
An October 2, 2013 email brings me back to a video filmed at Jean-Talon Market. I introduced myself as Sid Lee and Jimmy Lee’s videographer for the Moments videos. We were looking for music to accompany the footage with a Québec touch, street energy and the colours of fall.
That memory captures part of the work well: a video finds its personality in the dialogue between images and music. We needed to feel the place, then find a rhythm that made its presence alive on screen. The market offered a concrete starting point for telling Montréal’s story through an everyday moment.
Learning to Prepare and Collaborate
Archives from that period also preserve preparation for an aerial shoot planned in September 2013. I discussed ways to film the city from the air with the team, considering framing possibilities and equipment. That curiosity was part of my contribution: understanding the context before arriving in the field, then building images with people who knew the place.
Conversations with Virginie Roy, Benjamin Le Gall and other collaborators supported the work. Everyone brought their knowledge of the project, and the video developed through that collaboration.
A Stage That Still Matters
I remember the pleasure of exploring my city with a camera and an intention to tell a story. Sid Lee and Jimmy Lee offered a context where ideas, filming and editing came together around one goal. That work opened a path that continued through my collaboration with Tourisme Montréal and many other projects afterward.
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