Inside the Great Vaccine Race Nominated for Three Canadian Screen Awards
Searching for the coronavirus in bats in Thailand in the quest to create a pan coronavirus vaccine.
The dramatic story about the race to develop a vaccine against COVID-19 and save millions of lives, produced by Infield Fly Productions, is up for three CSA Awards. The documentary that chronicled the quest by four international research teams was honoured with nominations for the Rob Stewart Award for Best Science or Nature Documentary Program or Series, Best Picture Editing, Documentary for Cathy Gulkin and Best Original Music, Non-Fiction for a score by Michelle Osis.
“We are very excited,” said writer and producer Dugald Maudsley. “This was a very challenging film to make. We had crews all over the world embedded with research teams that were under tremendous pressure to move fast. And we had no idea how long it would take to make the documentary or what the ending would be.”
Infield Fly Productions followed six Labs pursuing different vaccine technologies, including BioNTech, who won the race, and teams from Cambridge University in the UK and the University of Saskatchewan. They also negotiated rare access to one of the Chinese contenders.
Given the stakes and the dramatic impact of the pandemic around the world, director P.J. Naworynski and Maudsley decided to pursue a very distinct musical style for the documentary. Inspired by TV series like Chernobyl and movies like Tenet, they searched for a composer with the ability to create the discordant, dramatic and tense soundtrack they felt was critical to the success of the documentary.
They found Michelle Osis, a classically trained pianist but also an electronic music producer.
“In our first conversation Michelle introduced me to an extraordinary array of amazing instruments that she wanted to use to create the score for Inside the Great Vaccine Race. The best was The Apprehension Engine. P.J. and I were convinced right away we had the perfect person.”
Inside the Great Vaccine Race not only follows the dramatic race for a vaccine, but also chronicles the remarkable personal journey of the scientists who sacrifice everything to produce one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in the last 100 years.
Weaving these intimate stories into the daily race was critical. Veteran editor Cathy Gulkin took on that challenge as well as dealing with the constantly changing structure of the film as the field team continued to shoot.
Gulkin is a three-time Canadian Screen Award winner for editing and brought nearly four decades of experience to Inside the Great Vaccine Race.
“It was a real pleasure working with Cathy,” said Maudsley. “She wasn’t fazed by anything. I kept changing the structure, rewriting huge sections of script, messing with the archive and Cathy just kept cutting. She had a great ideas, always let me know when I’d gone off the rails and was unfailingly calm.”
The Canadian Screen Awards will announce documentary winners on April 4th.