Computer Animation Festival

Speaker(s):
Frances Adair Mckenzie, -, United States of America
Fred Casia, -, United States of America

Speaker:

Abstract: Interdisciplinary artist Frances Adair Mckenzie brings her unusual sense of play to the realm of virtual reality by combining the tactile materiality of old-school stop-motion animation with cutting-edge technology in her most recent NFB project, The Orchid and the Bee, which speaks to the interconnectedness of all living things. Adair lives and works in Montreal. In this conversation about the process, she and her lead CG collaborator Fred Casia reveal pitfalls and eureka moments of integrating stereoscopic stop-motion in a spherical space in Nuke. The result is a full 360 immersion into a reimagined chain of genetic love affairs unfolding seamlessly in a rotating 8K HDR spiral. Presented by The National Film Board of Canada.

Speaker(s) Bio:
Frances Adair Mckenzie is an interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited in Canada and Europe. Her work negotiates speculative investigations into concepts of materiality, staging and form, always in deference to process as the hands-on manipulation of real materials and objects, most often through the interface of digital technology and sculpture. Frances’s augmented reality book, Glossed Over & Tucked Up, was published in 2016 by Montreal’s Anteism Press. Her association with the Nation Film Board of Canada began with the 10th edition of Hothouse, when she created the surrealist animated short A Little Craving.

Fred Casia, a Canadian born Filipino, is a graphic designer, animator, director, producer, illustrator and visual artist from Montréal. He was a founding member of The Parnell Fine Art Collective, an active member of the YPF (Young People's Foundation), as well as participating member of En Masse, through which he has exhibited artwork for several years, including outdoor art installations for the Osheaga music and arts festival, and several exhibitions for the Musée des beaux arts de Montréal. In 2017 he along with 5 other filmmakers formed Astroplastique, a free-form collective seeking to create a fertile ground for collaborative, animation-based work and pedagogy, including animation work for Sesame Street, Ted Ed, the United Nations, as well as workshops for multiple National Film Board of Canada filmmakers. He has worked on documentary and animated productions with the NFB including the Oscar nominated animated short Wild Life directed by Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, the Oscar shortlisted animation If I Was God directed by Cordell Barker, The Fruit Hunters directed by Yung Chang, as well as his own stereoscopic 3D animated short Marvin Parson’s Inner Wild Wilderness, which was part of the 6th edition of the NFB’s Hothouse. He also worked on Manic VR as a creative director, which premiered at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival and has won numerous awards including the Dok Neuland Award at Dok Leipzig, the 2019 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a 2019 Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Immersive Non Fiction Experience.

Speaker: