Genres: Animation

  • Fly My Spirits

    Elaine Pain has been drawing stylized birds for many years. To her, they are a universal “bird of hope.” Bright and colourful birds, with a life of their own, move to percussion music by Gordon Parsons, giving them a primitive power.

  • It Matters What

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.  The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant…

  • Button OUT!

    Button OUT! is a lively animated personal homage to the filmmakers own history of protest and the wider story of LGBTQ2S+ experiences contained in the collection of over 1200 buttons housed at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives in Toronto. Originally part of commissioning program: “Now and Then” — a video-art exhibition developed by the RT Collective in collaboration with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), Myseum of Toronto and the Gladstone Hotel. **Programmer’s Choice Best Short Film, Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, 2020**

  • Misadventures of Pussy Boy Trilogy

    “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” is trilogy of short videos subtitled “First Love”, “Sick” and “First Period”, each video’s running time is approximately 6 minutes, all videos are animated in a fashion that is very much “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, as told from the point of view of a transgendered youth in rural Cape Breton. Each video was animated by hand, the backgrounds were created like theatre back drops, with the characters hand painted and cut out, performing each scene in front of the matching background for the scene. Camera work involved shooting each shot for 3-5 seconds and then manipulating the characters…

  • First Love

    “First Love” is the first video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trilogy, made in 2002, our outcast 2Spirit youth Alick is seduced by femme Lesbian siren Kay with token resistance. Kay is also an outcast because of her Metis status, this shared outsider status draws them together in order to survive the tyranny of high school bullies against their queer romantic attraction.

  • Sick

    “Sick” is the second video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trans trilogy, produced in 2003. Alick is verbally and physically queer bashed at school, Kay shares with our anti-hero the power of reclaiming hurtful words like “sick”. Our protagonists find safety, comfort and acceptance in each other’s arms.

  • First Period

    “First Period”, the third video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trilogy, the title is a double entendre for the first period of school and Alick’s first menstrual cycle, a shocking event that sends our intersexed youth into an emotional tailspin. Alick is worried about how Kay will react, will she have anything to do with this “?”. Their burgeoning secret relationship is threatened by Kay’s friendship with Ray, the high school bad boy. Alick also relates how he acquired the name “pussy boy”. Alick learns his lessons well from his first love Kay and turns a bully’s taunt into…

  • The Evening Thread

    An old woman prepares to die. Accompanied by her granddaughter, she reflects on the memories of her life, and on the profound experience of being human, before taking the next step into the unknown.

  • Four Short Animated Films

    Four short animated films on one reel: The Magician’s Hat: A magician discovers more than a white rabbit in his hat with hilarious results. Making Faces: A simple blank figure is transformed into eighty different characters. A study of the variety of human faces. Alleycats: Alleycats are disappearing all over town! The solution to this mystery may lie behind the curtains of an apartment building. Computer animation. Eye to Eye: In this computer-animated film a man loses control of the parts of his face. Note: Also available from the filmmaker are four flipbooks from the Books That Move Series.

  • Magnificent Obsessions

    An assembled collage, with footage drawn from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources: memories stored on YouTube profiles and cell phone cameras, clips from classic melodramas and sitcoms. Taking inspiration from Douglas Sirk’s film, the project explores tropes of false identity, blindness, and desire within the context of a lurid Hollywood melodrama.