I'm pleased to announce that I've been invited to attend the Melbourne International Animation Festival in Melbourne, Australia from June 23 to 30, 2013 as a guest filmmaker.

Thanks to Festival Director Malcolm Turner for organizing this invitation. I really appreciate it. He's curating a series of screenings on recent Canadian Independent Animation for MIAF 2013. I've been helping him a little with research for this series. More details will be coming soon.

While I'm in Melbourne, I'll be leading a workshop on flip book animation and speaking about Canadian Independent Animation. I appreciate all the support MIAF and its sister festival the London International Animation Festival (which I attended in Oct. 2012), have given my work over the years. My films "Labyrinth", "Inner View" and "Sorceress" have screened at both Festivals.

I screened and discussed the creation of my film "Sorceress" (2012), a mythological adventure story. I showed storyboards from the film and discussed my paint on glass animation techniques. I also presented my new flip book, "Morphing City Hall" (2012), launched my DVD "Animation Noir: Films By Patrick Jenkins" and lead a short flip book workshop.

Thanks to the Toronto Animated Image Society for hosting this event and the great audience.

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I was at Word on the Street Toronto on Sunday Sept. 23, 2012

selling my dvds, flipbooks and chapbooks

Thanks to everyone who came by.

Here's a video of me demonstrating the paint on glass animation technique. It was shot and edited by Grayden Laing at Canadian Animation Blogspot.

You can see the trailer for my recent film "Sorceress" here.

A series about the making of my film Sorceress is now up at my blog at http://patrickjenkinsanimation.wordpress.com/

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It was also shown in December 2009 at Les Sommets du Cinema D'animation, Cinematheque Quebecoise, Montreal.

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"Inner View" premiered in November 2009

My new film "Inner View" premiered on November 11 at 8 p.m. at TIFF Cinematheque at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West in Toronto to a sold out theatre. Thanks to Madi Piller, Tara Schorr, the Toronto Animated Image Society, The Canada Council for the Arts and the Petman Foundation.

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My film "Labyrinth", is an 8.5 minute animated film. "After being given an enigmatic locket to protect, a detective encounters strange phenomena and beings from the afterlife in this surrealistic film noir story." Labryinth was done using the paint on glass animation technique and has been shown at festivals around the world.

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Labyrinth, an interview with Patrick Jenkins

Patrick Jenkins enigmatic short animated film Labyrinth premiered in June 2008 as an Official Selection of Animafest, the 18^th World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb, Croatia. Since then it's been shown at Festivals around the world and won 1st place, in the Independent, 6 to 30 Minutes Category, at the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International 2009.

Q: Can you describe the plot of Labyrinth?

A: It's a surrealistic detective story. The synopsis goes: "After being given an enigmatic locket to protect, a detective encounters strange phenomena and beings from the afterlife in this surrealistic film noir story".

Q: How did you get the idea for Labyrinth?

A: Labyrinth has its roots in a short story that I was trying to write around 1989 called "Hardboiled". It was about a detective who was an android. I was very much influenced at that time by the cyberpunk movement in writing: authors like William Gibson and Rudy Rucker and others. It was intended to be an illustrated story and I did a series of drawings of the detective and the city he worked in. For a number of reasons I never finished the story but I did have a lot of drawings. About 13 years later, in 2002, I dusted off those drawings and saw them in a different light. They became the inspiration for Labyrinth.

Q: Obviously Labyrinth follows in the tradition of film noir and the detective thriller, authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

A: We'll I've always loved the world of film noir for its gritty, urban look that has both a slightly romantic and dangerous feel at the same time. I like that there's moral ambiguity in those films and novels. All the characters seem to have sinister, hidden agendas. People, who initially seem normal, can sometimes turn out at the end of those films, to be very evil.

Q: But Labyrinth is not simply a straight up, normal film noir tale?

A: No, I was interested in the idea of the detective as a symbol of rationality, trying to decode and figure out his world from the little pieces of evidence he finds. Of course the detective, being a human being himself, has character flaws so he can never maintain his objective stance throughout the film. For instance, a common motif in film noir is the detective falling in love with the femme fatale. He knows it's a bad idea but he goes ahead anyway. (Laughs)

I'm curious about the choices we make in life. Sometimes we make decisions without knowing if they're the right ones or if we've correctly understood all the information upon which they're based. Yet all our decisions have repercussions, for better or worse.

The detective faces this conundrum in the film. He barely understands what's going on and yet he pushes on, trying to do the right thing.

I was also interested in using film noir because it's a genre that we recognize immediately. We say, "Oh it's a detective film." once we see the private investigator and the grimy city at night. That was important because I wanted to introduce elements of the afterlife or the otherworldly into this gritty, so-called 'realistic' urban world.

Q: Where did you get that idea?

A: Well actually I was influenced by a lot of writers who had a different take on the detective story. In my early twenties I read a lot of Jorge Luis Borges metaphysical detective stories and later the ideas of William Burroughs. I also really enjoy the writings of Frederic Brown, Marc Behm and Delacorta, all who seemed to be playing with the notion of the crime thriller. About 25 years ago I started really getting into Paul Auster's novels, especially his New York trilogy, which were self-reflective detective stories where the detective gets completely lost in his investigation, he can't figure anything out and a result he loses a sense of his self. A lot of that seeped into Labyrinth.

Q: Labyrinth is an intriguing title, but there's no actual labyrinth in the film?

A: That's right. I liked the sound of the word labyrinth. It had a very evocative feel. It's really a metaphor for the puzzling world the detective encounters in the film, the story as a maze.

Q: In a classic film noir way, the detective meets a mysterious woman in a bar, who gives him a pendant and runs off. What does she represent to you?

A: Well I was interested in the idea of the detective as a type of baffled, tarnished, modern day knight or samurai. He's trying to do "good" in the world but he finds it's not that easy. (Laughs)

When he meets this mysterious woman, she's on the run from two pursuing characters so we know she's got to be involved in something shady. She ducks into a bar to evade her pursuers and even though she doesn't know him, walks up to detective and hands him the pendant to protect and kisses him. I'm interested in how sometimes men and women can be attracted to and trust each other in a very short space of time, even though they don't know anything about each other. He hasn't a clue who she is or what she's up to, yet he takes the pendant from her for safekeeping.

Q: It seems like quite a big leap from your previous animated film "The Skateboarder" to "Labyrinth".

A: It does on the surface, but actually there's a link between many of my films from "The Goatee Club" (1999) which was based on a poem by Ralph Alfonso about a first time poet encountering the strange individuals at an open mike poetry reading; to "Man Versus Geometry" (2004) where a stick figure wrestles with a half circle; to "The Skateboarder" (2005) where the skater boy finds more than he bargained for in a construction site. That theme is the individual coming to grips with his environment, so in that sense Labyrinth is not that big a leap. Also shadows continue to play a huge role in my films. "The Skateboarder" was basically a shadow play and many of the characters in Labyrinth first appear as shadows behind frosted glass.

Q: Yet Labyrinth seems to be more about art and deeper ideas or themes? Would I be right in saying that?

A: I think so. I took about a year to develop the story for Labyrinth. In that time I asked myself, what was really important to me as an artist. A few things emerged for me. One was the idea of mortality. I had turned 50 and I wasn't young anymore. I started to reflect on life and the fact that we will all die some day. I wanted to work on this notion of the transience of life, that we're here for a relatively short time as human beings and then we leave the planet. We're gone. So in that sense Labyrinth is a mystery play about life and death

Also I'm interested in the notion that there may be more behind reality. I like to imagine that more is possible than what seems to occur in our everyday life. In some ways this is fantasy or a notion of other worlds.

The ideas of the writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) inspired me. Jarry was a huge influence on the Dada and Surrealist art movements. Jarry's philosophy, "Pataphysics", suggested an imaginary realm beyond our senses. His philosophy suggested another universe parallel to our universe, where anything is possible. This inspired me in developing the story for Labyrinth, where odd phenomena occur and figures from the afterlife interact with everyday reality. As an artist, I like to imagine what the world could be, rather than just replicate perceived reality.

Q: You changed technique?

A: Yes several years ago I got interested in paint on glass animation which is an experimental animation technique where you create a painting under the animation camera, take a picture with the animation camera and then alter the painting and repeat the process. No art exists at the end of the film, just the digital pictures that make up the frames of the film. I became interested in taking animation in a different direction away from the 'cartoony' look most associated with it. I had initially wanted to be a painter when I went to art school 30+ years ago and I still really enjoy painting. I started to do tests with paint on glass animation and found that I really liked it. It was great to work tactilely with real paint. Previously I had been creating work with cut-outs in the computer, which for me is not as gratifying a process. It was great to be able to manipulate real paint under the camera.

Q: The ending is very ambiguous with the shadows of birds flying away. Can you talk about that?

A: The birds at the end are, for me, simply a poetic image. They're not intended to make a specific point. In fact I intended them to be mildly puzzling. The film for me is a meditation on the transient nature of life and I think the birds, for me have that fleeting quality. Also when people die in the film, we see their life force or souls leave their bodies, so the birds seem to echo that for me.

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For everyone interested in Canadian Independent Animation, I thought that I would let you know about the book "Canadian Animation: Looking for a Place to Happen" by Chris Robinson (2008). It's composed of a series of interviews he conducted across Canada with independent animators. I am pleased to have been included in this book.

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Recently Completed

Labyrinth

35mm, Colour, Sound, 2008

8 min., 34 sec.

A paint on glass animated film.

Directed and animated by Patrick Jenkins

Synopsis: After being given an enigmatic locket to protect, a detective encounters strange phenomena and beings from the afterlife in this surrealistic film noir story.

Music Composed by Paul Intson

Death Is In Trouble Now: The Sculptures of Mark Adair

45 min., 2007

I am also curating a retrospective gallery show of Mark Adair's artwork that will be shown at the Rodman Hall Arts Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada from July 8 - September 16, 2007. The opening is on Sunday July 8 at 2:30 p.m.

For more information go to www.brocku.ca/rodmanhall

Of Lines and Men: The Animation of Jonathan Amitay

48 min., 2007

"Of Lines and Men", is a documentary portrait of Canadian Independent Animator Jonathan Amitay who has created innovative stop motion animated films using thin gold chains and sand. Amitay's award winning films about ecology, nuclear war and human rights, have been screened at film festivals around the world and have been honoured with retrospective screenings at Cinematheque Ontario and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. This documentary explores Amitay's films and traces the themes in his work to his childhood in Palestine during the Second World War.

My film "The Skateboarder" was chosen as a finalist at KAFI, the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International in Kalamazoo Michigan. The Festival took place in May 2007.

"The Skateboarder" was shown at the prestigious Annecy 2006 International Animation Festival in Annecy, France from June 5th to 10th, 2006.

This is a short 2-D computer animated film about a boy who, despite warning signs, goes skateboarding in a construction site with disastrous results.

"The Skateboarder" had its Toronto Premiere at the Canadian Filmmakers Festival on Saturday March 25th, 2006 at the Cineplex Odeon Carlton Cinemas.

"The Skateboarder" was shown at the Real 2 Reel Children's Festival in Vancouver Tuesday, February 28, 2006 and is also being screened at Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal on March 30, 2006.

It premiered at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival which ran from August 26th to September 5, 2005 and at the 2005 Ottawa International Animation Festival on Sunday, September 25th, 2005.

This film is about the misadventures of a boy who, despite warning signs goes skateboarding in a construction site. The film was made using 2D computer animation software and has a graphic quality akin to a shadowplay. It is 6 minutes long with a musical score by Paul Intson

The Skateboarder, an interview with Patrick Jenkins

Patrick Jenkins highly energetic short animated film "The Skateboarder" premiered recently at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival, and the 2005 Ottawa International Animation Festival. In 2006 it was screened at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Festival in Annecy, France; Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal; the Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth in Vancouver and The Canadian Filmmakers Film Festival in Toronto.

Q: Can you describe the plot of The Skateboarder?

A: Despite warning signs, a boy goes skateboarding in a construction site, with disastrous results. He pulls a lever that activates the construction machinery of the site. One of the pieces of equipment, a Steam Shovel, comes alive and tries to wipe him out. There's something not quite right about this construction site as eventually a huge devil like creature emerges from the ground.

Q: What was the Skateboarder film about for you?

A: Pure kinetics (laughs) and a pure delight in motion! I wanted to work on a film that was about action. After all that's one of the things that's enjoyable about animation, a story told through movement.

Q: How did you get the idea of doing it on a Skateboarder?

A: Well I had done a flipbook about a skateboarder many years ago. Skateboarding seemed like a kinetic activity that would look great in an animated film. Funny thing though, as I started to casually research skateboarding, I realized that skateboarders are really held done by gravity (laughs). I mean these guys and girls can do great things but they can't defy the laws of physics (laughs). At least not yet! Sure they can make short jumps and leaps and rolls where they seem to defy gravity but generally I was a bit disappointed about how gravity always seems to triumph. So when I animated the flipbook I used my imagination and had the skater do complete 360-degree flips and rolls that no regular boarder could and that carried on into the film version.

Q: How did the story of the Skateboarder develop?

A: Well stories for me develop from a set of visual images that I'm interested in. I did a series of drawings of the Skateboarder in different environments and situations and developed the story from those key images. An image or two would come to me, pop into my mind and I become intrigued by them. Then the challenge is to find a story or world or context in which these images make sense. It's funny because in painting you can paint the moment and let is sit there as an isolated image that we can contemplate. Film on the other hand is a flow of images that interact with each other and the challenge is to find a way of getting viewers into a world where they can entertain and draw meaning from bizarre or different images. It's like saying to an audience, for a moment, just imagine that this is possible. When it works, it's magical.

Q: What audience did you have in mind for the film?

A: I like to think audiences of all ages could enjoy it. It's been called a film for kids but that's not how it started. Coming from painting and drawing, I tend to develop a film from a series of images that intrigued me. In this film I was interested in a very graphic style of representing objects. The imagery is pared down to a shadow play. I wanted to combine this very graphic look with a very kinetic story.

Q: What animation technique did you use?

A: Well the project originally was designed as a classically animated film, doing drawings on paper by hand, then transferring them to cels and painting them and filming them. I had originally wanted a project where I could really explore realistic movement. When I got the Mac I decided to make it with digital cut outs created and animated in the computer. It was a real job to get the realistic motion that I wanted with digital cut outs.

Q: What about digital ink and paint?

W: Well that was still in its infancy when I started making the film. The way things developed technologically over the 13 years I was thinking about the project (laughs), I probably should have stuck to my guns and done it on paper.

Q: So you finally got started in 1998?

A: Yeah, August 1998 at the cottage (laughs). You know, nice summer weather and I'm indoors staring at a computer screen, sheesh. I worked at it in fits and starts, over the next six and a half years. I started at the beginning of the story and worked my way more or less in a straight line to the end.

Q: Were you working at it consistently?

A: Oh hell no. You're heard of low budget filmmaking? Well I was doing no budget filmmaking (laughs). The problem with doing a film with no money is that it is spiritually very challenging to drag yourself through the process of making the film. I would work feverishly for several weeks on it and then either something would distract me, like a commercial job or teaching and that would derail the momentum. Also I resist sitting, staring at a computer screen for hours and hours on end. It drives me crazy sometimes. I feel cut off from my body. I love to draw and paint on paper or canvas and here I had to draw into the computer, which I hate. It's a miracle I made it through the process (laughs).

Q: So you'd have to put it aside for a while?

A: Yeah, also other projects came and went. I did a half hour documentary on a poet called "Ralph: Coffee, Jazz and Poetry" that had four animated cut out films in it illustrating his poems. They were a lot less taxing to do, as the animation wasn't so exacting. Also I did a few commercial jobs. One was an animated children's music video and an animated video of the song "Dancing Street" by the band Katrina and the Waves. In the midst of that I was doing teaching and some administrative work as well.

Q: Did you do the sound work on the film yourself?

A: Yeah, I got out the pots and pans and started banging away. Most of the sound effects in the film are done that way. I much prefer "live" sound effects whenever possible as opposed to canned sound effects off a CD. There's more of a punch to the sound.

Q: The graphic, high contrast look of the Skateboarder is very distinctive. It reminds me of Lotte Reiniger's animated silhouette puppet films. Where did you come up with that?

A: Well in the early eighties, twenty years ago, I was making experimental shadow films where I would film shadows projected on tracing paper. Someone said it was like the myth of Plato's cave where we see life as a series of shadow projections, rather than the real thing. I've loved shadow imagery and certainly Balinese Shadow Puppetry and Reiniger's work were a big influence. A shadow is interesting as it's a projection of ourselves on the world. When I designed the Skateboarder it was just a given that he would be a black silhouette. Maybe that's my resistance to making things look normal. In my films I'm fascinated as much by the material that is making up the image as I am by the image that is created. In the case of the Skateboarder he's made up of a bunch of geometry, an ellipse for a head, a line for the beak of his hat, etc. I like that basic construction, as it looks different from what we are used to. It portrays a world through the simplest possible shapes. I was interested in how few lines and shapes you could use and still have a recognizable image of say a steam whistle or a skateboard.

Q: Wasn't your previous film, "Man Versus Geometry", based on a similar thing?

A: Exactly. In that film, which was a stop motion film make up of geometric shapes, the main character literally falls to pieces in a pile on the floor. A lot of this interest in the basics of the animation medium comes from my training as a painter and visual artist. In my paintings, I'm as equally interested in the paint that makes up the image as I am in the image. The paint takes on a sculptural quality. Art is a con, a construction, a trick designed to let us see something different. I feel better when I'm acknowledging the materials that make up the illusion of art.

Q: Well obviously the Skateboarder was important for you to do if you spent that long on it.

A: Yeah, maybe an unhealthy obsession (laughs). You know, there's a large part of me that is young at heart and needs to express exuberance and energy and I think that's what the Skateboarder is about. I mean look at the way we live. It feels so constricted at times. Don't make too much noise. Don't be rude. Shut up and behave. It wasn't that I wanted to be rude but movement is very important to me. We're kind of restricted in modern society. There's no nature left to explore so the boy in the Skateboarder goes exploring in what is left to him, a construction site. As a kid, I can remember playing in the few fields that developers hadn't turned into housing projects. Eventually they were all turned into subdivisions. The skateboarder is doing what every boy would do, explore his environment and test his physical limits in it. Now this may seem like an awfully deep interpretation of what is basically an action cartoon, but remember, we are creatures of nature. Our bodies are designed for movement and we get quite sick when we are denied movement. Baby animals play with each other just like humans, in order to understand their physical selves and environment, even though it's dangerous. A predator could kill them while they are playing.

Play is a way of understanding your body's relationship to the environment. Young men would go out with their fathers and hunt and learn how to work with their environment. In our world exploration has become internalized and ritualized. We're either exploring our subconscious or going on safaris and hikes into what is left of the natural world (laughs).

Q: So he's doing what comes naturally to boys?

A: Right. Boys don't mean to get into trouble. They just do that naturally in an attempt to learn about their bodies and their environment. They can't help it (laughs).

Q: He activates the machinery of the construction site but you go beyond that to have a Steam Shovel monster come to life and menace him.

A: Well, I'm a real believer in 'what if'. What if a steam shovel monster could come alive? What if a huge devil like character lived under the construction site? I guess I live in a fantasy world (laughs) but that's what intrigues me. I love; for instance, the way Rene Magritte would paint unlikely situations, like a giant green apple filling up a room. I like imagining 'what if'. Again it goes back to the deceptive nature of the world. How what you see is not what you get.

Q: At the end he gives up on skating in the site. Is there a moral here?

A: Well if there is a moral, it's totally baffling. I don't think the boy's learned much (laughs) except maybe to avoid that particular construction site (laughs). Often times in life you find that you have to be careful or stay away from certain experiences but I didn't want to say something as lame as "Don't go skating in construction sites". That's not the point. It's more of a spoof. It's more about the boy encountering a weird environment and possibly not learning anything from his catastrophic experiences.

Q: The Skateboarder seems to rebel against the signs that warn him.

A: Well, yes he does. I guess we have to ignore the warning signs sometimes and just plunge into the experience (laughs) regardless. I guess you could look at the film as a morality tale of sorts, about how we ignore our subconscious at our own peril. I sort of see those signs in several ways. First, obviously they are cautioning him about the dangers inherent in the construction site. They're saying, "You could be seriously injured. Stay out!" (laughs) That's the most obvious reading. Stay out! However I'm fascinated by how artificial signs are and how they mark territories. Our world is divided into territories of private property. This is owned by someone, keep out. We're assaulted by signs everywhere telling us to do this and that (laughs). Now this may seem to be a bit deep for what is really a little animated comedy, but the territorial markers are everywhere in our society.

So that's one way to interpret those signs. Another way is to look at it as warnings of internal crisis. Watch out, personal demons ahead (laughs)!

Q: How do you interpret the demon like figure that emerges from the ground?

A: Well obviously that's a bit of just having fun, that 'what if' that I was mentioning earlier. I thought that it would be neat to have things escalate from the skater's trespassing on the construction site to the point where it awakens this demon (laughs). I don't know why exactly. It seemed like a good idea at the time (laughs). Ultimately it's a fantasy. I enjoy sometimes thinking about why I do things but there are always a number of possible interpretations of the film.

Q: Technology seems very ominous in the film.

"Man Versus Geometry" is a 2.5 minute stop motion animated film in which a man encounters a treacherous half circle in a battle of wits.

"Man Versus Geometry" was shown at the 2005 Annecy Animation Festival in Annecy, France from June 6 to 11, 2005 in the Independent Canadian Animation Program.

"Man Versus Geometry" was shown at the Flicks, The Saskatchewan International Film Festival for Young People in Saskatoon, Canada, from April 7 to 10, 2005

World Premiere: My film "Man Versus Geometry" premiered at the 2004 Ottawa International Animation Festival which took place Sept. 22 to 26, 2004 in Ottawa, Canada