The city, through the people in it
City of Burnaby
The Client
The City of Burnaby is BC’s third largest city, and BBurnaby is its campaign to introduce that city on its own terms: transportation, housing, recreation, arts, culture, and business, all under one simple idea. The letter B, used as both a graphic mark and, in the video, a literal portal between scenes.
This project ran alongside Trapeze, a Victoria-based brand development and creative agency with close to three decades of experience shaping how public sector and private clients present themselves. Trapeze built the BBurnaby campaign identity, including the B graphic mark, and developed the modular structure this video needed to follow.
Their team handled the animation, building the B portal transitions frame by frame, and worked directly with us throughout the edit to make sure the motion graphics and the footage moved as one piece rather than two separate layers stitched together. That kind of collaboration only works when both sides are building toward the same idea from the start, and this project was a clean example of it.
The Challenge
A city campaign has to speak to a lot of people at once: residents who’ve lived there for decades, newcomers still finding their way around, and local businesses deciding whether to grow there. Burnaby needed one video that could do all of that, and still feel upbeat and personal rather than like a civic announcement.
The brief called for eight segments in one film: an opening, then six themes covering connection, home, activity, culture, the outdoors, and innovation, closing on the BBurnaby mark itself. It had to move fast, feel modern, and work as a single 60 to 90 second film or as six standalone cuts for social.
Our Approach
This project started with a clear creative brief and a distinctive device already in place: the letter B, appearing as a portal that carries the video from one theme to the next. Our job was to shoot Burnaby in a way that made that device feel earned, not just animated on top of real footage.
That meant finding real moments inside each theme, not staged stand-ins for them:
- Be Connected and Be Active needed motion, so we shot around transit and recreation spaces where people were actually moving through their day.
- Be Home and Be Outside needed a sense of place, housing developments and green space shot to feel like somewhere you’d want to live, not a real estate brochure.
- Be There and Be Smart needed people, culture and local business captured as they actually happen around the city, not recreated for camera.
The new footage we shot was cut together with event coverage, beauty shots, and aerials the City already had, so the finished film reads as one consistent piece even though it was built from several sources.
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Our Process
1. Discovery and Planning
We worked from the City’s brief and mapped eight themed segments into a single shoot plan across two days, coordinating with Trapeze on the shot list and the B portal transitions their animator was building in parallel. With the shoot dates set only a few weeks out, pre-production moved fast. We pulled together a stylist, a hair and makeup artist, a grip, a gaffer, and a PA on a short timeline, briefed each of them on the eight themes so wardrobe, lighting, and styling stayed consistent across two very different locations, and locked the plan before the first day of filming.
2. Production
Two shoot days across Burnaby: the Christine Sinclair Community Centre, Deer Lake Park, The Amazing Brentwood and Brentwood SkyTrain Station, covering recreation, green space, transit, and everyday city life across the brief’s six themes. Our gaffer and grip built the lighting for each location on the fly, since a mall food court and an open park need completely different setups. The stylist and hair and makeup artist kept the cast consistent across locations and looks, with a PA supporting the crew through both days.
3. Post-Production
Our editor cut the new footage together with the City’s existing event and aerial footage, synced to licensed music and voiceover, then built the animated B transitions into the final cut. From one edit, we delivered the full main video plus six standalone theme cuts, each sized for its own use on social.
Deliverables
1x main video (60 to 90 seconds)
6x cut-downs, one per theme: Be Connected, Be Home, Be Active, Be There, Be Outside, Be Smart
6x social media vertical cut-downs, one per theme: Be Connected, Be Home, Be Active, Be There, Be Outside, Be Smart
The Outcomes
The City of Burnaby walked away with a flexible campaign asset: one film that works as a complete introduction to the city, and six shorter pieces that can run independently depending on what a given post or presentation needs to say.
That modularity was the point from the brief stage on. A city campaign doesn’t get used once. It gets pulled apart and redeployed for months, and this one was built to survive that. A theme cut can run on its own in a recreation department’s feed while the full video plays at a council presentation the same week, without either one feeling like an afterthought edit.
It also gave the City something harder to put a number on: a consistent look across every touchpoint the BBurnaby campaign would reach. Six different themes, three different locations, and one video family that still reads as a single city telling one story about itself.
