If we were asked to pin down a date that Transposition began, we would probably say that it was conceived during a daring trip across the Canadian Rockies, which included a snowstorm and an old Chrysler minivan with worn tires. That adventure is telling of Transposition’s nature – always there is an adventure, a journey, and a goal. The adventure began in Vancouver, although really one could say it began years before even that.

Before there was the business, there was the friendship. We met during our intensive one-year course in Film Production at the Vancouver Film School in 2007. From the beginning, it was obvious to both of us that we enjoyed the creative energy our partnership brought to each production. Throughout that year, as we studied theory and applied it on many film projects, we grew to understand our own strengths and appreciate the other’s.

This brings us back to the road trip. While driving back home to our homes in the frozen prairies, a production company was discussed. For the next several months, during which we worked worked in our respective hometowns and went on to produce Camp Qwanoes’ 2008 summer, the idea of “transposition” from Clive Staples Lewis’ essay of the same title continued returning to the forefront.

Ordinarily, transposition is used in music to describe the movement of a collection of notes by a constant interval. In “Transposition,” Lewis imagines transposition as a metaphor of the adaption from a higher to a lower medium, where multiple elements are creatively transposed down to one. We extend the idea to include visual media. Even technically, the medium is transposed from three-dimensional elements onto a flat plane. For example, the world of perspective can only be defined within the range of angles, and only 360 degrees of them at that. In the case of narrative, we tranpose a world of subtleties and possibilities in the lives of many characters to one narrative arc, focusing the eye of the audience a very narrow slice of their world.

This process of transposition, although it can sound constrictive, is necessary to bring order and life out of chaos – the role of every artist. At Transposition Films, that process of searching for the elements that best express the whole is our adventure every day. We enjoy that search, and it brings alive every production we work on. In our search for original expression of these elements, we go back to Lewis again, who said:

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. “