Fanshawe filmmaker celebrated

Fanshawe Fine Art student Danny Alexander has taken home the award for Best Overall Integration of Elements at the London Canadian Film Festival held March 22 to 25, 2007 at Rainbow Cinemas.

The third-year student submitted a two-minute animation film called School Daze, which he completed as his final project for term five. He used a technique known as roto scoping, in which he took live footage and drew over top of it.


Alexander said he slowed the footage down to seven frames per second, and then used a projector to bring each image up on a wall, where he first traced them in pencil, before outlining them in black marker.

According to Alexander, the whole process took five weeks to complete. Each outline was then hand coloured.

“It was such an alienating process,” he said. “You're just sitting in a room staring at the wall for hours, actually for approximately 750 frames.”

As for the School Daze plot, Alexander said, “It's a classmate walking into the studio and then gets sucked into a canvas. It's a child-like, playful skit, with not much of a concept behind it.”

Three months after the project was completed, Art and Design Coordinator Tony McAulay approached Alexander about submitting it to the festival.

Nine student shorts were chosen and played before each of the feature films. It just so happened that Alexander's film was shown twice - and was the only film to do so.

“It's really weird working on it,” said Alexander. “You start to wonder if it's even worth making because you don't actually get to see what it's going to look like until the very end.”

Alexander, his teacher and five classmates went to Rainbow Cinemas to watch his short film.

“I had forgotten how much time I had put into it,” said Alexander.

Along with Alexander, 80 other people attended the screening, while 250 high school students caught the film and onlookers told him they were “laughing in all the right spots.”

As for now, Alexander plans on taking a year off and then going to film school, but not necessarily for animation. As for his film, he plans on making a compilation of all of his work here at Fanshawe and selling it for $5 at the Sarnia Art Walk.

“It's not fair to charge $10 or $15 for my work; no one knows who I am,” he said.