A young Trail videographer has been quietly making a name for himself.
But his latest video that captures his city in the still of night has turned up the volume.
Inspired by the movie Nightcrawler or more so the film's soundtrack, 19-year-old Eric Gonzalez decided to test out his new camera and drone last week.
His two-minute video was posted on Vimeo (vimeo.com/ericgonz) with a tagline to the Facebook following Lost Kootenays. That same day, he received a call from CBC and his work was featured. The video has been viewed over 6,500 times.
“I wanted to show Trail in a way that few people have seen it,” he told the Times Wednesday.
He certainly achieved that with aerial images of Teck Trail Operations glowing and smoking in the night.
“To not include it would not have represented Trail,” said Gonzalez, who graduated from J.L. Crowe Secondary in 2014. “It takes up quite a bit of town and I figured I might as well include it and do my best to portray the city.”
The video starts much like the opening to Nightcrawler with still images. But the storyline does not follow a young man out in Los Angeles like the film does, but rather captures Trail's lonely dark streets backdropped with the constant pulse of the smelter and flowing life of the Columbia River.
Gonzalez is home for the summer from marketing studies at the University of Calgary, where he is committed to gaining business insight all while honing his self-taught passion of videography.
“I think it's more important for me to make sure I get that stuff figured out before I do the artistic thing,” he laughed when asked whether he signed up for the wrong course. “The artistic stuff flows, you can do it on your own.”
He is enjoying his time at university plugging away at his studies while also capturing some pretty great videos for the school's newspaper.
But coming home inspires him in a way that the buzz of the city doesn't.
“I have an open canvas pretty much here so it's fantastic for me to be able to come back,” he said.