Oh, CANADA. You cinematic marvels of the music video. You connoisseurs of cool. Every time whispers and rumours of a new CANADA film circulate through the creative community, we all know we're in for a treat. 'I heard they're shooting some Italian road trip' or 'well I heard they took over a football stadium and invented a wild neo-futuristic death-battle sport.' Every outing feels like a celebration of cinematic possibility, a reinvigorating dose of new to an art form so dense with creators that it can sometimes suffer unintentional bouts of iterative same-iness. So when a new CANADA video comes out, well, we're all reminded of this medium's possibilities.

Their latest addition, 'Trying to be Cool' for Phoenix, is certainly no exception.

Masters of exploring layer upon layer of beautifully pure concepts, this video takes the idea of cool and weaves it into an ever-escalating performance by Phoenix, where every shot is like an act of one-upmanship over the last. 

Plenty of videos in the past have done the whole one-shot one-take idea, but this takes it a step further. Two cameras in a continuous relay race of a single performance by Phoenix, through a dizzying maze of one increasingly cool spectacle after another across a huge set. Quick sidebar: is anyone else totally amazed by the insane ping-pong skills singer Thomas Mars shows off? Seriously.

A cool Spanish collective and a cool French band. Without a doubt, there's no trying here at all. This is pure, straight-up, unfiltered, undiluted cool. High-fidelity excellence. What else would you have expected?

Nicolas Mendez of Canada:

"The whole video was built around the idea of a live performance getting cooler and cooler as the song went on. In order to capture these *cool things,* we spread the performance across a large set. Not only were they going to play the song live, but they also had to move around while playing. So, two camera crews followed them around, one shooting and one preparing the next shot so it could start just in time.

"We tried to transmit the stress we had shooting the whole thing, adding in countdowns to show us as well as the audience how much time we had left for the next shot to be ready."