Taking the long way home. An Oscar nomination for an animated filmmaker from Hamilton
OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATOR FROM HAMILTON SPENT MORE THAN 10 YEARS MAKING HIS 15-MINUTE HAND-DRAWN VIDEO
“… something rougher and unfinished like childhood.” TREVOR JIMENEZ In conversation about “Weekends”
“Weekends” debuted in October 2017, at the Warsaw Film Festival, winning the prize for best animated short. From there it made the rounds of dozens of festivals around the world, picking up more awards.
SHORTLY AFTER GRADUATING from Sheridan College’s renowned school of animation, Trevor Jimenez drew a picture of a young boy walking — head down, a suitcase in each hand — from his mother’s house to his father’s car.
It was a theme very familiar to Jimenez. He had made that walk many times.
His parents divorced when he was just two. For a time, Jimenez lived in Hamilton with his mother during the week and in downtown Toronto with his father on weekends.
When Jimenez drew that picture back in 2007, he had no ambitious plans for it — he was simply pouring his heart out onto the page, trying to express what it’s like for a child split between two different worlds.
“There were a lot of feelings in that (drawing) for me,” Jimenez says in an interview from Berkeley, Calif., where he now lives. “It was based off memories from experience with my parents.”
Twelve years later, however, that sketch is taking Jimenez to the Academy Awards.
The sketch started taking shape as a story, spawning another 10,000 drawings or more — that’s how many it takes to make the frames for a 15minute animated film in the handdrawn style he uses.
THE
END RESULT is “Weekends,” a charming and tender video, written, directed and animated by Jimenez, that is guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings.
“I tried to catch the feeling of divorce from the child’s perspective,” says Jimenez who attended Ancaster High School before moving on to Sheridan. “I hadn’t seen that done in animation before.”
On Jan. 22, the Academy Awards announced that “Weekends” was among five nominees vying for the Oscar for best animated short film.
Jimenez and his wife, Janine, will walk the red carpet and sit among the biggest stars in Hollywood when the winners are announced Feb. 24.
About eight years ago, Jimenez, 35, moved to the San Francisco area in pursuit of employment, eventually landing a job as an illustrator with Pixar, one of the top computer animation studios in the world.
For Pixar, he worked on films such as “Finding Dory,” “Rio” and “The Lorax.” Then Jimenez would come home and work on his own project “Weekends” — first the storyboards, then the edits, then the animation.
For “Weekends,” each sketch was hand-drawn in charcoal, then given to a team of friends who scanned it into their computers and filled in the background with colour.
As work intensified, Jimenez took a six-month leave from Pixar to complete “Weekends.”
“It took a long time to make,” says Jimenez. “It’s classically animated, 24 frames per second. You can draw every frame, but we drew every other frame for this. A lot of drawings, a lot of hard work.”
In all, it took Jimenez more than a decade to complete.
“Weekends” debuted in October 2017, at the Warsaw Film Festival, winning the prize for best animated short. From there it made the rounds of dozens of festivals around the world, picking up more awards as it went.
Although there are no spoken words in “Weekends,” the story is easy to follow. The main character, a six or seven-year-old boy, works as a lens into the separate worlds of his mother and father. We get a view of how the boy’s relationship evolves with each parent, the joys and the nightmares.
Jimenez admits it is based on his own childhood, although exaggerated for the purpose of contrast. His mother, still in Hamilton, cried with joy when she heard “Weekends” had been nominated for an Oscar. Jimenez is still not “exactly” sure how his father feels about the film.
Jimenez is more sure about why he chose to make “Weekends” with handdrawn frames, something all the more astounding since he works for a company that pioneered computer animation.
“I think the emotion you get from a drawing suits the tone of the story,” Jimenez explains, “something rougher and unfinished like childhood.”