A TRULY COLD HONOUR
Filmmaker pays tribute to friend by animating ice
Chris Dainty dons his National Film Board tuque, along with insulated jacket, steel-toe boots and rubber-palmed gloves, and ducks into the walk-in freezer of an industrial space in southwest Ottawa. He reappears with a cart that holds a large block of clear ice.
The block is manoeuvred onto a wooden skid and Dainty attaches to it a paper template featuring a rough sketch of a woman. He fires up an electric chainsaw and starts hacking off chunks.
The 36-year-old Ottawa filmmaker and ice carver is demonstrating the first few steps of how to create a human figure out of ice, a sculpting process that takes up to six hours and also requires chisels, grinders and saws in varying sizes. The ice itself took three days to freeze, the block formed in a special machine that ensures it comes out crystal clear.
Dainty and his crew crafted three ice sculptures depicting the female form to use in his animated short Shannon Amen, which premières during the Ottawa International Animation Festival. The event runs from Wednesday to Sept. 29 in various downtown locations.
The 15-minute film pays tribute to Dainty’s longtime friend Shannon Jamieson, a prolific visual artist, writer and musician who took her own life in 2006 when she was just 23 years old. Dainty uses more than 100 pieces of Jamieson’s art to tell her story, as well as her music, poetry and archival footage from her life. Shannon Amen was the name she used to sign her work.
“She was a really good friend of mine, especially through high school,” Dainty says. “We both grew up in Hawkesbury and she lived down the street from me. We’d have adventures exploring the forest, sketching, creating art together. Everyone who knew her really thought she was a cool, awesome individual. When she took her life, it was a blindside for everybody.”
Jamieson already had come out as gay before she died, but even her closest friends didn’t realize the conflict it created with her faith. Raised in a Christian family that attended a Baptist church, she once had a minister tell her she didn’t “have to be” gay.
After her death, Jamieson’s mother asked Dainty to help go through her artwork. That’s when he discovered the depth of her internal conflict.
“For me, the ‘aha’ moment was this one work: She wrote over 100 times, ‘I feel guilty.’ That was really revealing. I couldn’t have imagined her ever feeling guilty just because she was so confident,” he said. “She also wrote a lot in her journals about her inner turmoil of having these two things that were really important to her and feeling torn between them.”
Dainty decided to tackle an artistic project based on her work, partly to help him deal with his
own feelings of guilt that he hadn’t been able to help her. It turned into a National Film Board animated short with Michael Fukushima as executive producer and Maral Mohammadian producing.
A graduate of the animation program at Algonquin College, Dainty and his wife Jennifer run their own animation company Dainty Productions, where most of the work they produce is for commercial clients.
Dainty also teaches illustration and concept art at the college.
For the last five years or so, Dainty also has been an avid ice carver — he’s competed in Winterlude ice-carving competitions and is a member of the Canadian Ice Carvers Society.
“There’s something beautiful about ice. It’s creating art. You have to live in the moment. You have to do it fast because it’s melting on you,” he says. “It can also be sometimes scary because ice is slippery and very heavy.”
Dainty first tried animating ice for a sponsorship reel created for Ottawa’s animation festival, featuring an ice sculpture of a deer walking. He was happy with the results and was able to show the NFB it was possible.
Still, more experimentation was required. Teaming up with fellow Ottawa ice-carver Kevin Ashe, whom Dainty considers one of the best in the world at sculpting the human form from ice, they went through a series of tests in hopes of streamlining the process. To get the best results, though, there were no shortcuts; each sculpture had to be fully carved in 3-D from a full block. Then a refrigerated truck transported them to the shoot’s location at Saint Brigid’s event space, a former Catholic church in Lowertown.
In the film, the ice figure appears to represent Jamieson at her most vulnerable, struggling with her identity in a dark church that will never accept her. She fractures, shattering into a thousand pieces.
Dainty describes ice as the “perfect medium” to convey the spirit of his friend. “There were a lot of different sides to Shannon,” he says, “and at the core of it was her soul. She had a beautiful soul and ice is really beautiful, but it also has a lot of reflections and a lot of different sides. It’s frozen water, it’s delicate and extremely fragile and beautiful, but also extremely strong.”
To bring the ice woman to life, Dainty and his team devised a technique he calls “icemation,” involving a mix of stop-motion animation and puppetry with some digital touch-ups. The rest of the film takes its design style from Jamieson’s artwork, which was full of black crows and skeletal trees, as well as religious iconography. Each of the animated frames was hand-painted, the crows textured with thick black paint.
Dainty worked closely with Jamieson’s mother, who was the chief creative consultant, and brother, who helped with production.
The team also managed, after a year of perseverance, to secure the rights to use Michael Bublé’s version of the Frank Sinatra classic Come Fly With Me. It’s the tune that happened to be playing on the car radio in the final video that Jamieson shot before she died.
For Dainty, the film marks his first entry into the competition portion of Ottawa’s animation festival. The grand-prize winner gets a chance at being shortlisted for the Oscars. “It’s a big deal for me,” he says. “Every filmmaker wants to find their way to the Oscars.”
He believes Jamieson would be thrilled at the results.
“I think she would laugh at the craziness involved,” he says, “and the amount of effort and work that’s been given to this project to tell her story.”