Two Holy Trinity Academy graduates with a love for animation have films featured in Vancouver film festivals this month.
Nineteen-year-old Jake Brassard’s film Inside Loogaland was featured in the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Kooks and Legends Animated Motion Pictures last week and 23-year-old Chantal Beaulne’s 3D film Mongoose was accepted in the SPARK Animation 2016 Film Festival Oct. 20 to 23, as well as Sommets du Cinéma d’Animation in Montreal Nov. 23 to 27.
“Seeing my film on the big screen was amazing, especially seeing it with an audience,” said Brassard. “It’s like a dream come true.”
The four-minute film, which Brassard created while taking classical animation at the Vancouver Film School, is about two characters playing games involving various creatures in Loogaland from sword fighting with frozen snakes to spraying each other with skunks. It was screened on Oct. 11.
“Each frame was drawn on a new sheet of paper, I scanned the sheets of paper and did a composite of them,” he said. “You do 12 drawings for every second of animations. You put it on the scanner and the scanner pulls through each sheet one at a time.”
Brassard said he composed the sound track for the film using a keyboard and synthesizers.
He created Inside Loogaland under the direction of instructor Marv Newland, the curator of Kooks and Legends who selected 11 cartoons to be screened at the festival.
“It’s been my dream for a while to get my film into a festival,” Brassard said. “The fact that it was at the Vancouver Film Festival was pretty special. I was ecstatic that he picked it.”
Brassard said while he never made films while growing up in Okotoks, he was always interested in learning the process.
“When I was in high school I knew I wanted to draw and I always knew I wanted to work in film,” he said. “I wanted to find a balance and classical animation was the perfect fit.”
Brassard now works as a teaching assistant at the Vancouver Film School and makes short films in his spare time.
“I just want to keep making films and keep sending them to festivals,” he said.
Brassard is currently working on a project that uses computers as little as possible. Instead, he draws his images on paper and photographs them.
“I just did a sequence last night where I animated with wet paint,” he said. “I had the shutter in one hand and the brush in another. I would push the paint a little bit and take a photo. I did that 700 times over the night.”
Beaulne is also working on new animated films after her four-minute-long animated flick Mongoose was selected to appear in two film festivals this year.
The former Okotokian completed the four-year animation program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design last spring and is ecstatic to have a film she created during her last year of school featured in two upcoming film festivals.
“It’s nice to have people watch something you put so much effort into and enjoy it,” she said. “After all that hard work it’s nice to see it on the big screen. There is so much content online it’s hard to stand out.”
Mongoose is about a woman who confronts a childhood imaginary friend who took up residence in her wall.
“This film is vaguely based on a ghost story I knew as a little kid about a girl who had an invisible friend who claimed to be a mongoose,” she said. “She felt her whole life was defined by this friend.”
In the short film, the woman feels trapped by the childhood version of herself, which holds her back from moving forward in her life.
Beaulne’s film is done both on paper and in puppetry, the latter of which she grew a love for while studying as an exchange student for a year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
“They had much better stop motion facilities and they have a history of having very good stop motion work,” she said of Edinburgh. “I find puppetry is much more satisfying and up my alley. It’s different from drawings. I can envision spaces better.”
Some of Beaulne’s favourite movies were done in puppetry, including Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.
Beaulne is currently working on short films with the National Film Board of Canada, which she said is famous for its animation and dominates film festivals around the world.
She’s also tweaking a film she made in school to submit to festivals.
“I will just continue submitting to festivals,” she said. “I’m focusing on big festivals throughout the year and I’m hoping to get into film festivals in the UK. Sometimes you get advertisers say they would love for you to do an ad with that style.”
Beaulne discovered her love for film while taking a new media class at Holy Trinity Academy.
