Making of the Inovia Capital ALS #IceBucketChallenge Video

The date was Tuesday, August 19th and team in the Calgary office came across this on Twitter:

My first thought was, “Oh no, what are we getting ourselves into?” And then my second thought was: “ok, so how can we make a really epic video?” Antoine, our senior analyst, was visiting from the Montreal office, so Kevin, Shawn, he and I immediately put our heads together to come up with the best way to respond to their challenge.

Shawn is our resident helicopter pilot (yes, exits do pay off), so he quickly went to work to determine whether we could safely stage an aerial water drop. We decided we would fly out to a remote location and quickly put something together. We called up our friends at Dissolve to lend a hand and get involved.

We found a great spot in the middle of the Elbow River, stationed our cameras, equipment and did a test fly-by to make sure we could hit the target with water. We had a 2-hour timeline for the video because we needed to get all the footage before the sun went down. No pressure.

We ended up doing the #icebucket scene four times. Kevin was the only one who got hit with water the first three times. You might not be able to tell in the video, but his entire back is soaked for the final take. And, yes, the Rocky Mountain glacier water out of the Elbow River was ‘ice cold.

Simultaneously, Chris Arsenault (on vacation this week) and Karamdeep Nijjar (who was in Waterloo) filmed their own #icebucketchallenge videos. Since they couldn’t join the west team in Calgary, we cut them into the final video at the end. Sadly because of such short notice, we weren’t able to pull in David Nault and Geoff Judge.

All in all, it was a fun experience for a great cause. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), none of us will be leaving our day-jobs at Inovia to pursue acting careers. We also apologize for getting Pat’s hair wet — something we told him wouldn’t happen.

We were happy to donate $500 to ALS and hope that our co-investors, LPs, friends and supporters will do the same. We called out our friends at Accel Partners, Teralys Capital and DealMaker Media to participate in the #icebucketchallenge! And we’ll gladly report back on their response! You can donate online on the ALS website.

UPDATE: Teralys Capital has stepped up to the challenge and they threw in a little surprise…by doing it at OUR office in Montreal!

UPDATE: And Debbie Landa of Dealmaker Media rounded up a whole crew of folks to do the #IceBucketChallenge with her! Here it is:

For the full story on how this all started, check out the Betakit article by Joey Czikk: #IceBucketChallenge: OMERS Ventures Calls Out Real Ventures, Inovia and Georgian Partners