The process of filming The Herd was, at its core, about learning how to see and unlearning how I had been taught to see. Entering the North as both observer and outsider, I found myself in an unfamiliar land where the landscape itself became a central character - timeless, yet constantly shifting in the present.

I first approached it through images I already knew: the painted landscapes of the Group of Seven, the stillness of archival footage of early explorers, the inherited myths of the North from films like Nanook of the North. But those representations soon fell away. The real North revealed itself through weather - a whiteout seen from a small plane, where sky and earth dissolve into one vast, disorienting field of white. In that moment, you lose all sense of direction. The only remaining scale is sound: a crow’s call, the pulse of wind, the howl of a wolf.

Suddenly, the mirage of a reindeer herd appears like dark coffee spilled across snow. Steam rises. Thunder follows: the hooves, the grunts, the breath, the sharp clicks of fetlocks as they pass. The snow crunches beneath them like breaking ice. Watching them move, you begin to see not through a colonized lens of landscape-as-spectacle, but through an animal’s gaze alive to weather, hunger, and instinct. The film’s visual language evolved from standing in relation to the herd, observing its rhythm and patterns of behaviour.

Working with the film unit and local Indigenous people, and traveling alongside hunters and modern-day herders, I began to understand that everyone saw the herd differently - as livelihood, as sustenance, as history, as kin. Each person carried their own knowledge of, and relationship to, the land and animals. For me, it became a process of decolonizing my own lens by learning to listen and look beyond my settler assumptions to find a relationship that felt truthful. By tracing the routes of both history and geography, I began to grasp how deep those connections ran. The journey became as metaphysical as it was physical, reshaping my perception of the place and, as a settler from Toronto, my understanding of where “here” really is.

In summer, the air thickens with insects that hover and swarm over the herds’ backs. The land itself vibrates. Slowly, I began to understand the North not as backdrop but as consciousness, an environment that films you as much as you film it. The white canvas of the landscape became my teacher. In the plane during a snowstorm, on the ground walking, traveling on the water or by dogsled, eating, feeling the scale of the place I began to sense time differently - in geological rhythms, in animal movement, in silence.

Conventional documentaries felt too factual and detached to contain that experience. What emerged instead was something more personal and expressive, embodying a way of filming that felt closer to painting or composing music - one that listens, surrenders, and learns to see again. I found myself blending documentary and drama to tell the story. Conventional interviews felt small and artificial against the sweep of Arctic time and history. I was drawn to the hubris of the quest itself, the impossibility of it all, and yet found meaning in the minutiae of insects, frost, the small gestures that gave the story its true scale.

In The Herd, the landscape became the central character, shaping every aspect of this human-versus-nature story. I began to feel that documentary could be the new novel, a form where imagination defines structure. Encountering the North allowed me to step into the living history of the reindeer drive, where the sense of place remained largely unchanged, even as the tools of navigation evolved.There were precedents for cattle-drive Westerns, epic journeys; but this was something different: a Northern reinvention. A story that could be trans genre-defying, yet ultimately existed beyond them, guided by nature, human survival and our very imaginations.