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.
