Interview with Chris Dainty, director of ‘Shannon Amen’
UPDATE 09/10/2020 – to mark World Mental Health Day Shannon Amen is now available online in full via nfb.ca (watch in full below)
Ottawa-based animator and artist Chris Dainty has been active in the world of animation production for well over a decade. Having co-founded the studio Dainty Productions in 2006 that has produced work for film, television, games and interactive media, Chris’s most recent endeavour has been produced with the National Film Board of Canada and serves as a uniquely personal reflection on a cherished friendship.
Produced by Maral Mohammadian at the NFB, Shannon Amen is built on the words, music, and art of Shannon Jamieson, a struggling and tortured artist whose ongoing struggle with the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between her religion and sexual identity. Born in Ontario, Shannon – who also went by the pseudonym Amen – graduated from the Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts prior to her tragic death at age 23 in 2006. Creating work in both her home country and in France during her studies, Shannon’s art explored themes of “identity, the body, and religion’s often restrictive views on gender and sexuality”.
In Shannon Amen Chris, with the help of Shannon’s friends and family, has drawn upon his own memories of their friendship, his personal journey of coming to terms with her passing and the wealth of art she left behind, as well as archival footage married with an array of ambitious and diverse animation techniques (including a unique and previously-unexplored approach to sequential ice-sculpting Chris has dubbed ‘icemation’) in order to convey the length and breadth of her complexity as an artist and human being. While pointedly acknowledging the ongoing issues that generate much by way of internal struggle, sorrow and conflict LGBTQIA+ youth endure even today, at its heart the film serves more as a loving celebration of Shannon’s life than anything else.
In anticipation of the film’s premiere this week at the prestigious Ottawa International Animation Festival we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to learn more about the emotional journey of making Shannon Amen from director Chris Dainty.
Shannon Amen, Chris Dainty, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
Can you tell us a bit about your background as an artist and some of the work you’ve done prior to Shannon Amen?
I’m a graduate of the Algonquin College Animation program and I currently teach there, in the Illustration and Concept Art Program, one day per week, and have done so for the past five years. I started my 2D animation studio, Dainty Productions, Inc., with my wife, Jennifer, in 2006, and we’ve worked on lots of different commercial projects over the years, including animation for TV (Odd Squad, Dino Dan) and games (Sesame Street Wii games), as well as complex apps that include animated content and video, most recently The Wild Gang.
Your previous work includes the recent short film One Last Dream that, while being an ostensibly lighter film in look and tone, goes to a pretty dark place by the end. What were the circumstances and inspirations behind that project?
The co-director, Noam Rabinovitch, came to me with the script; he had already secured funding from BravoFACT. I really liked the idea for the film; while I’m not a vegetarian myself (Noam is), I do think that it’s very important to think about where your food comes from, and I was super happy to jump onboard as co-director and have my studio animate the film. It was really a first chance for me to create something more artistic, and I felt that it helped me to develop the general look and feel and aesthetic that I had always wanted to create.
On the technical side I was intrigued by the character animation approach in that film – what sort of production process/rigging systems did you use to achieve that look?
One Last Dream was done in Adobe Animate. Textures from real pigs were used in the character build, which were developed in Photoshop. We had an amazing background artist, Fabian Cuevas, produce the backgrounds in Photoshop, which had a traditional painted look, which I loved. For Shannon Amen, animators used Adobe Animate, ToonBoom, TVPaint and traditional drawings on paper, depending on their preference. We then had artist Izzy Campbell digitally colour each frame in Adobe Animate, and used After Effects to add high-resolution scans of Shannon’s artwork as textures onto every frame of character animation. Compositing was also done in After Effects. The backgrounds were done in Photoshop by the same background artist who worked on One Last Dream.
Your latest film Shannon Amen being built on your friendship with fellow artist Shannon Jamieson, can you elaborate on how this friendship came about and the impact it had on you?
Shannon and I grew up in the same small town of Hawkesbury. We were great friends, especially in high school and after. We would spend our time enjoying nature, trekking through the woods and creating lots of art together: sketching and photo shoots. She was an extremely talented artist, and I loved making art with her and sharing it together. Shannon was a huge influence on me artistically; her skill level was unbelievable, especially for her young age.
I note that the film doesn’t so much make pains to criticize the social issue of religion being at odds with the struggles of LGBTIA+ youth as it focuses on the virtues of Shannon as a person and artist. Was it important to you emotionally that this project be more of a celebration of her life than a lamentation?
Yes. Firstly, it was very important to me to have the film not come off as a critique of religion or the church. I grew up in a Christian family, attending church; Shannon grew up in a different church, but we attended the same youth group. Shannon had a deep attachment to her religious faith. Unfortunately, she didn’t get a great response from her church when she came out as gay, and that created inner turmoil and guilt, which she showcased in her art. There are many churches now that are more accepting, and I think this is such an important and positive change, but there are still many churches and religious institutions that are not very accepting of the LGBTQ+ community, and I strongly feel this needs to change. It was also important to me that the film, which is obviously upsetting due to some of its content, be a showcase for her artwork and a celebration of who she was as a person and as a prolific artist. Her art is unbelievable, and I really wanted the world to be introduced to it, and to her as a person.
Do you maintain shared connections with Shannon (in the artistic community or otherwise) and were any of them involved or able to assist with this film?
Shannon’s mother, Ellie, was involved throughout the entire creation of the film. She is the creative consultant on the film, and she made creative decisions as well throughout production. We went through Shannon’s art together and had many conversations about Shannon and how to go about making this film, which we both believe tells an extremely important story. Shannon’s brother helped film the final scene, flipping through Shannon’s notes. Shannon’s friends were involved too. Our mutual friend Trevor Dixon-Bennett was the editor, and another mutual friend, Brett Despotovich, provided some of the tracks we used as the drone music during the church scenes. Another key person was Lyndell Montgomery, a phenomenal musician whom Shannon looked up to very much, and Lyndell produced the beautiful and haunting violin tracks that play throughout the film. It was important to me from the start to involve as many of Shannon’s friends and family as possible. Everyone loved Shannon so much, and everyone was so excited to help.
Shannon Amen (Dir. Chris Dainty, ©2019 National Film Board of Canada)
Further to that, what has been the response to the film from other people in Shannon’s life?
Everyone who has seen the film and knew Shannon really loves it and feels it is authentically her, which is so important to me. Obviously, it’s extremely emotional watching the film for anyone who knew her. We used over 100 pieces of her art, poetry, music, videos, photographs and audio recordings, so it’s a very intense experience for those who knew her, but the response has been full of love so far. I’m excited for more of her friends to see the film during the OIAF screenings.
What sort of prior relationship if any had you had with the NFB before this film, and what circumstances led to this film being made with them specifically?
I had never worked with the NFB before, but it was always a dream of mine. I had met Maral Mohammadian (the producer of Shannon Amen) multiple times throughout the years, mainly at the OIAF’s animation conference. It was at the 2015 edition of this event that this film really began. I just felt this need to tell Maral Shannon’s story, and although it wasn’t a completely fleshed-out film idea at this point, Maral really connected with Shannon and her story and art. We ended up talking for hours and skipping a bunch of screenings. Maral was able to begin the “Investigate” stage for the film shortly after this meeting, and we worked really hard for about a year on how best to tell Shannon’s story.
Given that the film is clearly a very personal emotional journey, what sort of pros/cons were there in it being a professional production (as opposed to a more auteur approach)?
It was mainly pros! For past projects I’ve worked on with my company, we’ve had teams of up to 15 people, who I would direct. There were a couple of differences with this production though, one being the long length of time (almost four years in total); usually we have quicker turnarounds, especially for TV broadcasts or ads. Another was the scope of difficulty, which was extreme (icemation is not easy, and we hand-coloured each frame of 2D animation, which was very time consuming!). I had directed 2D animation before, but when you also add in directing the ice-carving teams, original music, and post-production, which were areas I was less familiar with, the difficulty level rises. The number of crew members on this film was huge: 25 with the animators, stop-motion and ice-carving crew alone, so keeping on top of directing that many people, often simultaneously, while also animating and ice carving myself, was a really big job.
Emotionally, I did find this film really hard to work on at times. After Shannon passed, I had a lot of internal guilt over anything I could have said or done; I was really blindsided by her death, as was everyone, because she was a very confident individual, so the shock and guilt were definitely there. For me, a hard part of working on this film was cutting away sections of the story as we went. The film became much stronger over time, but it was difficult for me to let some aspects go that were personally important to me but didn’t necessarily further the story.
The visuals often draw on Shannon’s art itself using a variety of processes. Can you discuss how you went about selecting/interpreting these works and how you determined the best way to pair them with an appropriate animation medium?
Shannon left behind a huge collection of art: paintings, pastels, ink, photocopy prints, pencil sketches, poems, digital art and recorded music. She also meticulously documented her life in journals, so there’s lots of written content, as well as hours of video and audio she had recorded. Prior to her death, Shannon had given me a large amount of her digital photos from our artistic collaborations and adventures, so I knew those would be important in the film. My goal was to showcase as much of Shannon’s original art as possible, and we managed to use over 100 pieces in the film. I also knew the home video and audio was really important because it was raw and intimate. I used 2D animation as a way to bridge everything and make it all come together narratively. It was really once we discovered the music video of her singing in the church (which she made as an art project while studying in France) that the look and feel of her 2D character came together. Shannon had this iconic jacket that she wore all the time, and I knew this type of detail needed to be featured to make the film less confusing between video and 2D animation. I tried to have the styles set up Shannon in the perspectives we see: 2D animation (the person I knew), ice (her inner self), and photos and videos interjecting the story with her own raw perspective.
The practice of ice carving plays a key role in the look and execution of this film. How did you wind up developing that particular skill?
I always wanted to learn how to carve ice, and it was a long-time dream of mine to work on the large ice sculptures at Winterlude (which is a large winter festival that happens every year in Ottawa). I started carving in 2013 and joined the Canadian Ice Carvers Society, eventually becoming the vice president for a couple of years. In 2015, I partnered with ice carver Kevin Ashe at the International Winterlude Competition, where we carved a tree composed of human bodies. The human form is one of the most challenging things to carve in ice, but that experience gave me confidence that we could create something on an epic scale with full-scale human sculptures for this film. Kevin was one of the many ice carvers from the Canadian Ice Carvers Society who came together to help carve all the sculptures we needed to pull this off.
Can you elaborate on the process of ‘icemation’ and how it was used in the film?
Although I’ve always worked in 2D animation, I’ve always loved stop-motion. In 2014, I came up with the idea of icemation, stop-motion animation of ice carvings. I tested the concept and created an animation loop of a walking ice deer as part of the Ottawa International Animation Festival’s sponsorship reel. I loved the way it turned out, so as soon as we started on Shannon Amen, I knew I needed to incorporate the icemation technique into the film. We make and carve the ice at the Canadian Ice Carvers Society Clubhouse. We use special ice-making machines that have a continuous flow of water, which is how the ice blocks are made to look crystal clear. It takes 65 hours to freeze a block of ice in the machine, and each block weighs 300 pounds. We carve the ice inside a giant walk-in freezer and we also store the finished carvings there. The length of time varied depending on the sequence we were making, but they all took anywhere between three to six hours per sculpture. Some shots just required a head, so that helped optimize ice for full-scale characters. I estimate that we used around nine tonnes of ice (around 60 blocks) in total. We then transported all the sculptures on a refrigerated truck to St. Brigid’s Church in downtown Ottawa and shot on location over two nights. It was really important to shoot on location like this, because the ice has so many reflections and is crystal clear, so it’s amazing seeing the reflections and different aspects of the church through the ice.
The film will be premiering at OIAF this coming week. From what I gather you’ve worked for the festival in the past, will this be your first time having a film screen as part of the official selection?
This is the first time I’ve had a film in competition at OIAF. One Last Dream, as well as a film I directed and animated in 2006 called Emma Graves, both screened in the Canadian Showcase at OIAF, but not in competition. I’ve also had work rejected by them, so even though I’m from Ottawa, the competition is extremely hard to get into.
Do you have any particular hopes for how the film will be received and what audiences will take from it?
I’m hoping that the film helps instill empathy in people and helps them realize how it can feel to be marginalized. I hope that people outside of the LGBTQ+ community are able to see, through Shannon’s eyes, what it can feel like to not be fully accepted for who they are, and the damage this can cause. My overarching goal is to accelerate acceptance in order to save lives.
Shannon Amen screens in OIAF’s Short Competition 3 on Thursday September 26th 9:15pm and Saturday September 28th 9:15pm