Drawn to the Wild with Sarah Harmer

We’re delighted to be part of a project this year that combines music, conservation, and Canada’s wild and beautiful landscape. We’re talking about Drawn to the Wild, a project that first came about through a partnership between Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer, Mountain Equipment Co-op and The Big Wild. This project was originally inspired by The Johnny Cash Project, a website we continue to admire for its originality.
Drawn to the Wild aims to raise awareness around threatened Canadian landscapes. It invites Canadians to contribute to a new version of a Sarah Harmer video and support the protection of part of the Niagara Escarpment at the same time. In the video, Sarah is singing “I’m a Mountain” as footage from her  documentary and concert film, “Escarpment Blues”, features Sarah and her band touring across southern Ontario.

When you first visit http://DrawnToTheWild.org, you’re presented with a randomly selected frame from a short segment of the documentary video. After choosing a frame, you use a drawing tool to illustrate it — tracing it, adding to it or radically re-envisioning it. The site aggregates the resulting frames into a new version of the video. Each time someone draws a frame, The Big Wild donates 25 cents to Sarah’s Protecting Escarpment Rural Land (PERL), an organization she cofounded. When enough frames have been submitted, The Big Wild will release a new remixed version of the video. We eagerly await the finished product and we’ll be sure to share it on our website when it’s done.

In the meantime, Darren has put together a screencast, below, to help you better understand how the project works and what to do if you’re interested in submitting a frame, yourself. Have fun, drawing!