Your Path, Your Adventure

It started with a social media post. Doug Cook, one of the most talented directors working in Calgary, put out a call. He had a concept for a Onewheel spec commercial and was looking for someone with the board. I happened to own a Onewheel. I had known of Doug's work for a while and this felt like exactly the right moment to reach out. A few coffee meetings at Starbucks later, Doug had a plan locked and I had a shoot on the calendar.

The concept was built around a child's imagination. Not the Onewheel as a piece of gear or a technical product, but as a symbol of the kind of freedom kids take for granted. The world as a five-year-old sees it: full of possibility, where a toy version of a board on a drawing table can become the centrepiece of an entire universe. Doug's instincts here were sharp. The commercial didn't need to explain the product. It needed to make you feel it.

Bringing In Erik — and Jasper

I called Erik Johnson, a fellow DP and someone I've collaborated with more than once. He was the right person to co-shoot this. As it turned out, he came with an unexpected addition to the team: his son Jasper, five years old. We convinced Erik the kid needed to be our lead, and once you see Jasper on camera you understand immediately why that was the right call. He's not performing. He's just being a five-year-old, and that is exactly what the commercial needed.

Casting a real child over a child actor changes everything about the energy on set. There's a naturalness you simply cannot manufacture.

Dave's Living Room as a Film Set

We used my house as the primary location. Set dressing a real home is a different challenge than working in a studio. You have to work with what's there, cueing in the details that read correctly on camera while masking the ones that don't. Doug had a strong eye for this. He brought a clear sense of what the space needed to feel like: warm, familiar, lived-in, the kind of room where a kid could plausibly spend an afternoon lost in his own imagination.

We spent about a day and a half inside. Most of it was Jasper at the drawing table, the miniature Onewheel sitting among crayons and paper and toy cars. Simple setups with careful light and Doug's direction keeping everything grounded in the child's point of view.

DIRECTOR DOUG COOK · CANON C500 MKII RIGGED FOR LOW ANGLE · ONEWHEEL COMMERCIAL SET · CALGARY 2024

The Snorricam and Half a Day Ripping Around Calgary

The exterior sequences were the other side of the shoot: half a day out in Calgary on the board. The key piece of kit was the snorricam rig, a body-mounted camera system that fixes the subject in frame while the world moves around them. For a board like the Onewheel, that perspective locks you in at hub height, close to the ground, and gives you the sensation of riding rather than watching someone ride.

We ran a lightweight GoPro on the rig. The compactness mattered. The setup needed to work while the rider was actually moving, which meant less gear, not more. Doug had planned the shots precisely enough that we could move fast through the locations and get what we needed without burning the day on setup time.

What Doug Built From It

Doug's post-production work is where the commercial really came together. One of the details I was most curious about was the clone stamping. The snorricam rig is visible in the raw GoPro footage and Doug painted it out entirely in the final edit, leaving a clean perspective with no trace of the equipment. It's the kind of meticulous finishing work that separates a well-produced spec piece from one that stops short.

Tyler Lemermeyer's motion graphics layered over the board in the riding sequences added the illustrated dimension that ties the indoor and outdoor worlds together. Jasper's crayon drawings becoming animated, objects coming to life around the board as it moves. Mitch Lee's sound design grounded it. The voice-over, "Your Path, Your Adventure," was sharp writing and delivered exactly the right register: direct but not heavy-handed.

Doug also served as his own production designer, which meant the visual language was consistent from the room to the street to the grade. Two shoot days, Doug's edit, and a complete commercial came out the other side.

BEST COMMERCIAL UNDER $30K · ALBERTA FILM & TELEVISION AWARDS · AMPIA 2025

The commercial went on to win Best Commercial Under $30K at the 2025 Alberta Film and Television Awards. For a self-funded spec project built in two days, shot in a living room and on Calgary streets, that recognition matters. It's proof that the creative call Doug made, keep it intimate, cast a real kid, let the imagination do the work, was the right one.