Experimental Animation grads to get weird and wonderful as part of GradEx

When she was making her short film Doll, OCAD U Experimental Animation student Yuanye Zhang, took a big creative risk: she decided to do stop-motion animation with fabric. Fabric is, by nature, soft, and floppy, and bad at holding shape, and almost the exact kind of material you wouldn't want to use for stop-motion animation. 

But those kind of weird creative risk are exactly why the program was created, according to chair Philippe Blanchard. The goal isn't just to create technically skilled animators, but animators who engage in "play, risk taking, and discovering new things."

Zhang's Doll is about a doll who lives in an all-fabric world, and receives that world's ultimate power: a pair of scissors.

"She abuses the power of the scissors, and causes a lot of bad consequences," she says. "That's the story I want to tell, about the abuse of power."

Doll, along with the work of all of Zhang's fellow Experimental Animation majors, will debut as part of OCAD's annual graduate show, GradEx, in a screening that takes place May 3 at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox, where this year's grads will be showcasing their short films.

She says that while the story came easily, the technical challenge of making a fabric world, and posing characters in it, was much tougher. 

"Fabric is so soft and hard to control," she says. "When you want to make little movements, it's hard to get it to keep its shape."

The trick, she says, was staging the characters on a metal surface and using magnets.

"I used an iron platform," she says. "And then I put the magnets under the props."

Ceejay Garrido says she was drawn to the Experimental Animation program because students get so much more leeway than in traditional animation programs.

"It's really exciting to not just go through the same animation pipeline that everybody knows," she says. "At OCAD you have the opportunity to try different things, different mediums."

Garrido is the director of Don't Sleep on the Subway, a collaborative effort between her and several of her classmates. In it, an artist nods off on the train, only to have it transform into a fantastical world. Garrido was chosen as the director since she came up with the concept for the piece. She says that she wanted to choose something that felt universally relatable.

"I wanted something that was relevant to all of us," she says. "And I realized that we're all commuting to the city, whether it's from the suburbs or across downtown, we all use the TTC. It's very Toronto-inspired."

She says that the film was "a love letter from all these students to their art." She adds that, while all those individual talents and passions are what makes the film amazing, pulling them all together was the most challenging part of the project. The film was originally supposed to be a project for a first semester class, but because "a lot of us were kind of perfectionists" it didn't get finished in time. Thankfully, they kept working on it in their spare time over the second semester.

"We were like 'No, we're going to do it,'" she says. "So then we spent the next semester doing it as well. And due to the cooperation of all of our teachers, who gave us assistance, [we could] get to that finish line and be able to present that. There were just so many people contributing to the project. It's like such a supportive community that we have had."

Blanchard says that ultimately, he hopes his students keep collaborating and working together long after they finish at OCAD. 

"One thing I would really love to see is for these students to move into their careers and start animation studios, put projects together and take a bit of that  entrepreneurial spirit and collaborative spirit and parlay that into opportunities."

Works from the OCAD U Experimental Animation program will screen at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Theatre (350 King St. W.) in Toronto on May 3, starting at noon.

Correction: This article originally misgendered the protagonist of Don't Sleep on the Subway as female, when in fact the character was nonbinary. Also, Ceejay Garrido's surname was misspelled due to a typo. We regret the errors.