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Annecy Festival
Flight of Fancy Acclaimed Canadian directors Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby discuss their stunning new short The Flying Sailor.
A
nimation lovers around the world do a little happy dance whenever Canada’s acclaimed directors Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby have a new project screening at festivals around the world. The talented artists, who are best known for their Oscar-nominated shorts When the Day Breaks (1999) and Wild Life (2011) and their award-winning United Airlines ad The Meeting (2006), are back on the scene again with a new short titled The Flying Sailor, produced by David Christensen and the National Film Board of Canada. Forbis and Tilby, who met in the 1980s when they were both students at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in
Vancouver, were kind enough to answer a few of our questions: Can you tell us how you came across the story that inspired The Flying Sailor, which is premiering at Annecy in June? A number of years ago, we visited the Maritime Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There was a section dedicated to the devastating Halifax Explosion of 1917 (which, by the way, was the largest man-made blast to occur prior to the atomic bomb). Among the displays was a short blurb about a British sailor who was blown skyward from the pier and flew a mile before landing uphill, naked and unharmed.
We were intrigued. What did he see? What did he hear? What was he thinking? It’s a story that brims with animation potential. Riffing on accounts of near-death experience, our concept was to expand those few catastrophic seconds of life into as many minutes, and imagine the story of the sailor’s flight. When did you start working on it, and how long did it take to make? Though the idea had been simmering on the back burner for many years, the film officially went into development in 2018 and took about three and a half years to make.
www.animationmagazine.net 102
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jun|jul 22
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