Calgary Co-op's new Oakridge store opened in March 2025. On 30 June we stood in the parking lot of a working grocery store and pointed cameras at the building it replaced. That single fact, a live store full of customers on the other side of the fence, set the shape of the job before anything came down.
Elan Construction brought us in alongside Priestly Demolition and Calgary Co-op to document the takedown. The Oakridge site is being rebuilt in phases, and this was the phase where something visibly disappeared.
The situation
The work was planned around material recovery rather than speed. That is a slower demolition and a different one to look at, structure taken apart in sequence so steel, concrete and fill leave the site sorted, instead of a building pushed into one pile.
It also meant the story was as much about what left the site as what came down. A film about speed would have been easier to shoot and would have described the wrong job.
The schedule set the rest. 4 visits across the summer, each timed to a different stage: the centre intact, the structure opening up, the working face at its most active, and the graded pad at the end. Months, not a shoot week.
How we worked it
Chris McElwee ran creative direction and split his time between ground video and the drone. I was on ground video and stills. Connor McIvor flew FPV and cut the film.
Aerial carried the stage-to-stage comparison. From above, the same footprint photographed across 4 visits is the clearest record there is of a building leaving a site. FPV did the opposite job, close and continuous and through the structure, which is the shot that makes a demolition legible to someone who has never stood next to one.
The frames I kept coming back to were the least dramatic ones. Sorted steel going into a bin says more about how this job was run than any wide shot of a wall coming down.
