Nunavut stories captured in clay

JOHN THOMPSON

They’re called animation shorts, but each production certainly takes a long time to create.

That’s a lesson 15 participants at a week-long workshop hosted by the National Film Board were still absorbing, inside Iqaluit’s Inuit Broadcasting Corp. building, hours before their deadline on Thursday last week.

Take Gyu Oh, who spent half a day sculpting a dog and its master from modelling clay. Then, she spent five hours yesterday evening and this morning carefully adjusting the models before shooting a single frame with a digital camera, in order to make a short claymation movie.

“At the moment, I have about nine seconds,” she says.

At another table, Celina Kalluk flips through a series of pencil sketches she’s drawn of a common Iqaluit scene: a young woman tears open a chocolate bar, then tosses the wrapper on the ground.

She sums the story up as “litterbug learns a lesson.” She still can’t decide whether to give her woman a pair of bug antennaes, jutting from the amauti hood.

Over Kalluk’s shoulder stands John Tanasiciuk, an animator from Winnipeg, who offers advice on how to fine-tune her storyboard.

He points to a sketch of Kalluk’s character, distressed, after a raven chokes on the wrapper. Then he drops a quote from Charlie Chaplin: Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

She nods, and crops the drawing tight around the girl’s upset face.

Across the table, Jolene Arreak listens to her iPod while sculpting from modelling clay – fittingly – a much smaller iPod, to be held by a clay model girl.

Her story involves a young girl who goes camping with her grandfather, who is eager to share stories from his life.

“She’s going to realize how important they are, after her iPod runs out of batteries,” she says.

Other stories underway involve tough-guy hunters who turn out to be afraid of bumblebees, and an elderly couples saved from an evil snowdrift by Iqaluit’s own superhero, Polarman.

Similar workshops will be held this month in Cape Dorset and Pangnirtung. Afterwards, from the 45 participants, four will be selected to spend another week in Winnipeg, where they will fine-tune their ideas, followed by four months at the Banff Centre, where they will complete their productions.

The 800 pounds of equipment shipped north by the National Film Board for the workshops will also stay in Nunavut, leaving each of the three communities with a functioning animation workstation, including a computer, digital camera, scanner, pallet – a special kind of monitor that responds to the touch of a stylus – and plenty of modelling clay, felt and other materials.

About 30 years ago the NFB visited the eastern Arctic, which led to some of the first animations created by Inuit, by the Nunatsiakmuit Film Society. But when the NFB left, the equipment soon fell out of use.

“This will hopefully stay,” says Debbie Brisebois, executive director of IBC.

The four final animations will hopefully be shown on APTN, Brisebois says.

The workshop will also likely rub off on IBC productions. Among the participants is Michael Ipeelie, a producer of the popular IBC children’s show Takuginai.

He joined to learn how to produce children’s animations, and says he hopes to eventually add some animated segments to Takuginai – although he says the show’s fans will have to wait to see.

“I’m not really much of a drawer, but I can carve,” he says.

“I’m learning how to draw now,” he adds with a laugh.

The response in Iqaluit was overwhelming, Brisebois said. “We probably could of put on a whole other workshop,” she says.

In all, the animation workshop will cost about $500,000, funded by the Government of Nunavut’s department of Economic Development and Transportation and department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth, as well as the National Film Board, Nunavut Film, and IBC.