Genres: Animation

  • breath

    A beautiful cameraless film based on the text and structure of a haiku, “breath” explores the interplay between sound, image and written word. The soundtrack is created by an optical light reading of three haikus and one short poem, all written by ninth-century Japanese poetesses. The film’s structure is based on the five-seven-five syllabic composition of a typical haiku.

  • cockroach

    “Cockroach” is a handmade, cameraless animated film constructed with basic materials found around the home – newspaper, ink and Kool-Aid. Using cockroaches as a metaphor for language, it chronicles the pervasiveness and endurance of these primordial creatures. Text by Christian Cotroneo (“It’s a bug’s life in downtown Toronto,” originally printed in the Toronto Star) is used to create the soundtrack.

  • Charleston Home Movie

    A charming and evocative sketch of the streets and people of a Southern American city. The images, distilled from hours of “home movies,” are converted from live-action to animation through a process called rotoscoping. “Morse’s drawings are beautiful, partly because of what she chose to leave out of the drawing and partly by what she chose to leave in. It is an almost perfect representation of a person’s memory.” – Grand Rapids Press

  • Sand

    “Japanese narration, snail-like aliens, teenage gossip and a dreamlike, grainy style of sand animation mingle in this strange and beautiful short.” – Chris Gehman, Images Festival, 2002 In Japanese with English sub-titles. Selected screenings & awards: Best Short Film, Cinemanila International Film Festival; Antimatter Festival of Short Film & Video; Vancouver Underground Film Festival; Festival de Cinema de 3 Ameriques, Quebec City, QC, 2005

  • Road Trip

    Late-night musings about the perfect road trip take form in animated photographs and a story that is all road trips combined.

  • Tran Scan

    A stunning cross-Canada journey. A sequence of 112 specially designed telescopic time-lapse scenes form a seamless “flight” across the continent from Pacific to Atlantic. A new way of seeing. A celebration and a memorial. “The telescope becomes a microscope… and a stethoscope.” – SXA “A hypnotic meditation on landscape and perspective.” – Seattle Weekly “Reminiscent of extreme IMAX films, Tran Scan has beautiful scenery and cinematography of the highest caliber. Undoubtedly the most labor-intensive travel film ever created. No still image can convey a sense of this film.” – POV Magazine Selected screenings & awards: Silver Remi Award in Cinematography,…

  • Bug Girl

    Part science movie, part storybook, “Bug Girl” is an ecological fable. While searching for her lost cat, a young girl accidentally swallows a bee. Macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds collide and the young girl enters the biotech garden. Here, innocence is lost and her journey transforms into a visual tumble through nature, biology and consciousness. “Bug Girl” is primarily intended to be an installation piece shown in a gallery context. However, it can also be screened as a single-channel work. For the installation, the image is projected onto a circular screen with surround sound. Contact the CFMDC for fees and technical…

  • Booty Dance

    An animation that seeks to deduce how lesbians and gay men can exist in harmony on the dance floor.

  • Oh Me!

    “Oh Me!” is in the form of a diary written by the animator, who is trying to take an account of his life 20 years after his film “Oh Dad!” was created. As in all of Amitay’s films, the animation was done by using fine chains and coloured sand.

  • Invisible Hand, The

    A dazzling confluence of stop-motion chalk drawings illustrate this story about greed, gambling, bankruptcy and confession. The cast of characters includes Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco), Kenneth Lay (Enron), Jeffrey Skilling (Enron), Andrew Fastow (Enron), Bernard Ebbers (Worldcom), Sam Waksal (ImClone) and Martha Stewart (ImClone), among others. Selected screenings & awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour, 2004; Best Short Documentary, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Montana, USA, 2005; MadCat Women’s International Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, 2005