News Article

Digital Animation students awarded for their work


7/6/2004 10:11:47 AM


The digital animation feature Bland Date - starring God and the Devil - won first place at the third annual Animediafest digital animation festival in Halifax.

By Melissa O’Quinn

July 6, 2004 – College of the North Atlantic’s (CNA) 2004 Digital Animation (DA) class, Bay St. George campus, participated under the Group Animation category at Nova Scotia Community College’s (NSCC) annual Animediafest, and walked away with the first place trophy.

Although it was the third year for Animediafest, a festival for the Atlantic-Canadian media community, it was the first time CNA’s Digital Animation class took part. Not a bad way to begin.

Their entry was a piece entitled Bland Date – a spoof of the famous television dating show Blind Date. In this particular episode, the host, Roger Lodger Dodge, whose name is a spoof as well, sets up a date between the most unthinkable personalities: God, and a female version of the devil, Lucy.

The outcome is inevitable as Lucy thinks God is a pansy, and God thinks Lucy is the greatest thing since sliced bread – temptations included.

Scott Gillis, a current first-year DA student, attended the festival to cheer his school on and says the audience’s response would have been reward enough.
“It was a great experience to learn what people are looking for and what the competition is like on the mainland,” says Gillis.

The festival’s keynote speaker was Wayne Gilbert, who worked for 10 years as head of Sheridan College’s world-renowned animation department. He was full of compliments when it came to CNA’s project.

“Bland Date is a well-paced and very funny spoof with an edgy mix of subtle and definitely-not-subtle humor,” he says.

Gilbert is known for his work at Disney Canada, and Industrial Light and Magic, a major film production company in San Francisco founded by George Lucas, creator of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters (Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park to name a few). Gilbert's company, Anamie Inc., is in pre-production for its first animated feature film titled Tangel.

Due to the success of the festival – students, educators and professionals from each of the Atlantic provinces were in attendance – organizer Peter Labelle strongly supports the idea of rotating the event to different colleges each year, and DA instructor Glenn Curry seems to agree with that.

“We would love to host the event right here,” he says.

The DA program offers an assortment of drawing and digital courses such as animation drawing, classical animation, Avid Media Composer and Photoshop, and graduates can obtain employment in a variety fields that range from designing web graphics to applying concept modeling for architectural firms.

Curry says the equipment is new and the software is always up to date, and through the course of the program, students are trained according to what the industry wants. He believes the students’ success at Animediafest is attributed to the quality of the program, and winning at the event was definitely a stepping-stone to future success.

“I definitely think it raised awareness about the work we are doing with students,” says Curry. “I think we’re getting better every year. And because of Bland Date, we’ve already received interest from potential employers.”

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