animation again: combing through my notes from OIAF 2025

Still from "Evacuations" showing the paint smear technique used by director Lilli Carré. Image courtesy of Western Exhibtions.

I came into animation without much preparation; one day I was signing up for classes during my post-bac degree, and the next I was finding the niche I’d be working in for years after. Among the octopus legs of my interdisciplinary art practice, animation is one that I used often during my MFA study and during the pandemic the year after, but that since then I have taken a break from. Returning to the Ottawa animation festival this year, having been there for the first time seven years ago during my MFA, was a reawakening of that limb. Here are seven things I’m reminded of from this past weekend:

1. You can always start anew. 

Animation was an important medium to me from when I entered a post-bac program in 2015 through to the pandemic in 2020 when I completed a short film that the U.S. government technically paid me to make (between stimulus checks and furlough giving me time to make work at my leisure). In the intervening years since, I have focused my practice on photography, dance, and video - but at a Meet the Directors event this past weekend I listened to an animator director and teacher, Lilli Carré, talk about her short film “Evacuations” and was struck by how, though she teaches the subject, the style of animation she used was new to her - something she wasn’t sure if she could do at all - and it was accepted into and awarded at an international festival. 

2. You can be as weird as you want.

To witness the simultaneous weirdness and full commitment of the festival in Canada’s capital city of embassy buildings and castle-like architecture can make for a strange experience for the experimental-animation uninitiated - or it can be a siren song for those who have made their own strange stories and seek kinship with and inspiration from those who are excellent at this craft. In what other medium could I create an adventurer dodging knife tips and climbing up vines; a lemonade stand both queer and cutting and delicious; a vagina that is also a gun?

Still from "Ankle Bones" by animation student Nicole Altan. Image courtesy of MUBI.

3. Artist community is everything.

Though the five days of the festival are packed with screenings, networking, and presentations, the events that spoke to me the most were the Meet the Director panels: segments of animation directors being interviewed and taking questions from eager animation students and festival-goers. Hearing the animators talk about their craft and process first-hand brought me the most inspiring pages in my journal, such as..

4. Test and learn!

   
   

The director of a commissioned animated short, Joël Vaudreuil, said about his work for “Cardinal” that the making of it was mostly testing out ways of using the scraps of cardboard he was compositing together in his studio: seeing what made visual sense, what wasn’t working. I saw the animators’ experimentation so vibrantly in their films: layering leaves and garden debris onto a flatbed scanner, a character designed with sticks under her heels, the intentional shakiness left for the final cut - all made more interesting because it was tried. 

"Shadows" by Rand Beiruty. Image courtesy of UniFrance.

5. Listen to the muse.

Writing notes at the Meet the Directors events led me to the first ideas I’ve had for creating an animation in a few years. Sketching frames from the films I watched at the screenings led to me sketching frames I could create, textures I could use, new ways of making I could experiment with. 

6. Write it all down.

Last time I attended the festival I didn’t keep much of a journal or notebook, whatever inspirations I left with undoubtedly folded into my art practice but aren’t available to me now. This time I took a travel journal with pages for both the experience of the trip beyond the festival, as well as notes about the films. I am holding it close for inspiration and to be able to look back on what I was thinking and which films I was interested in at the time. 

Still from "Death does not Exist" directed by Félix Dufour-Laperrière. Image courtesty of BFF arthouse films.

7. Let it simmer (if you can finish an animation, you can finish anything).

Though I’ve left the festival with lots of notes and drawings, I want to let the imagery steep. For previous animations I’ve made a strict story board and stuck to technique I was familiar with, but this time I’m feeling drawn to trying something new, something that might not work at all. It took me four years to complete five animated short films, and it will most certainly take a good chunk of time to complete the next one. Five minutes isn't long in the grand scale of the entire film world, but for an animation five minutes means that each of those hundreds of frames was hard fought for. With any art form the thing you really can't replace is time, but I’m convinced that if you can make an animation - each one of its eyeblink frames - you can make anything. And I can’t wait to see what that might be.