Algonquin Grads Compete in Ottawa International Animation Festival
Posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021
The Ottawa International Animation Festival, which starts today and runs until October 3, is North America’s oldest and largest animation festival, featuring thousands of entries from across the world.
This year, Algonquin College will be represented in the festival’s Canadian Student Competition with a short film by recent grads Noah Henman and Isaac Lyons. Their entry, Mammoth Gorge, is one of 23 official selections in the competition, alongside films from Sheridan College, Concordia University and Emily Carr University, among others. This is the first time in years Algonquin has had a film in the running.
Mammoth Gorge, which features Ice Age hunters seeking out a mammoth, was Henman and Lyons’ final year project. It is two minutes long and traditionally animated, meaning every cel is drawn by hand.
Since the advent of computer animation, drawing by hand is no longer the norm in the industry, but it’s a skill Henman and Lyons were grateful to learn in the three-year animation program at Algonquin. Indeed, they say the first two years of their studies were focused on fundamentals, such as drawing on paper, a skill they’d like to see more of in the industry.
Henman, who is from Colorado, and Lyons, who is from New York State, came to the program at Algonquin due to its stellar reputation. Henman heard about the program from friends he’d met online, and Lyons heard about it through Henman, who he’d met and befriended online while he was in his first year for animation at a school in New York. Lyons felt the New York program was lacking, so when Henman sent him a demo reel from Algonquin, he decided to make the switch.
“I thought, that seems cool,” says Lyons, “on par, if not better than a school like CalArts, but in Canada, a country I want to be in and a place where I’ve always had friends.”
Lyons says he has loved animation since childhood, when he spent a lot of time doing both stop-motion and drawing, then “put the two together and kept doing it.”
Henman became interested in animation through coding and video games. When attempting to create his own video game, his animator backed out at the last minute. This forced him to do it himself, and he had a revelation. “I realized I hated coding and love animation much more,” he explains.
Henman now works as a Harmony Animator for the Vancouver offices of the celebrated Atomic Cartoons (which also has offices in Ottawa), and Lyons works as a Harmony Animator for Jamfilled, a studio in Ottawa. Harmony Animators get their name from a popular animation software called Harmony, now one of the mostly widely used softwares in the industry.
The pair chose to forgo co-op during their final year at Algonquin to focus instead on creating Mammoth Gorge.
“In most schools, you do films,” says Lyons, “but Algonquin’s program doesn’t do that so you can focus on [learning] more.”
“We had to sacrifice quite a bit to get [the film] done,” he adds.
It is hard to covey the amount of work the two students put into their short, which they essentially worked on their entire final year. Storyboards, background concept art, character design, animations, colour design – it was a lot to take on.
“There were times when we didn’t think we were going to finish,” says Lyons.
They even turned down work offers so they could focus on it, which is why being an official selection is such a thrill for both grads.
“I’m excited,” says Henman. “It’s the biggest animation festival in North America. At Algonquin, we’re encouraged to volunteer at the festival every year, so I never got to go, just volunteer. And now my film’s there.”
You can view Mammoth Gorge as part of the Canadian Student Competition starting Wednesday September 22, 2021. You can find more information on how to view it here.
The winner of the Canadian Student Competition will be selected by a panel of judges, made up of industry veterans, and announced during a live online awards ceremony on Friday, October 1 at 7 p.m. Click here to check out everything the festival has to offer this year.