New western Manitoba digital animation festival helps showcase talent from Brandon and beyond

A new film festival that had its first event in southwestern Manitoba this week hopes to continue connecting digital artists, animators and audiences for years to come.

The inaugural WestmAnimation Festival was launched by the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon as part of Culture Days — a nationwide celebration of arts and culture that takes in September and October.

The new festival, which screened 13 shorts at Brandon's Riverbank Discovery Centre on Thursday, was created to bring digital artists together, said Ana Camelo, one of the festival's organizers.

"It is really hard to find colleagues and people to have these conversations" about digital art, said Camelo, who is the digital projects co-ordinator with the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba.

The festival served to show there is a vibrant scene in the community, she said, and was a good way to show people that digital art is "dynamic."

"This is accessible. People enjoy it."

Digital art is any art made using digital technology, including media created on a computer or hand-drawn images scanned into a computer. Some involves manipulation of video images to create animations.

WestmAnimation organizers put out a call for submissions earlier this year, and got responses from people in the western Manitoba area and beyond, said Camelo.

"We received some submissions from people who once lived … in Manitoba, or even, like, in the western area," she said. The work submitted was "really rich in the variety."

"It is amazing to see so many different themes and techniques across all the submissions," said Camelo.

The festival includes work from "super experienced artists that are very well known in Canada," she said, such as acclaimed Manitoba artist Diana Thorneycroft and Anita Lebeau, a Manitoban who has created shorts for the National Film Board.

But it also features the work of people trying out new things, Camelo said.

"We have kids experimenting with stop-motion as a result of a workshop we hosted here before."

The 13 animations submitted will be judged in three categories — under 18, over 18 and audience choice. All 13 shorts are available on the art gallery's YouTube page, which also has a link to the audience choice award voting form.

The winners will be announced on Oct. 20 at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba.

'There's a lot of talent'

One of the artists featured in the festival is Erica Lowe, who lives in Harding, a small community northwest of Brandon. She submitted her own animation to the festival, in addition to helping her children — Mateo Finnie, 12, and Charlie Finnie, 9 — create a stop-motion short. 

"The ones I made on my own are just like paper cutouts ... pictures that I've drawn, I cut out the different parts of it and then I create little variations of them to add movements," Lowe said.

"With my kids, we do Lego animation where you move the Lego guys just a little bit.... It's really fun."

Camelo said the hope is to make WestmAnimation an annual festival.

She launched the festival with help from local artist Chris Reid, who took classes at the gallery. 

The more she studied the art form, the more Reid wondered who else in the community shared her passion for animation.

"There's a lot of talent, but finding it and making sure that it's showcased isn't always that easy," Reid said. "People are there — it's just finding them."

Reid approached the gallery with the idea of starting the event to help bring digital art creators together.

It was a thrill to see submissions roll in for the festival, she said, and even more exciting to see an audience gather at the Riverbank to take in the digital creations.

"Hopefully we'll be able to have a second one.… This was a pilot project," said Reid, who hopes the festival will be a part of Culture Days every year.

As an artist from the region, Lowe said it felt great to be part of a festival that draws the digital arts community together in Westman.

"There's a lot of artists that probably really find it a really great way to express themselves," Lowe said. "I feel it'll just grow from here."